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CRANBURY: Small-town living key to longevity?

By David Kilby, Staff Writer
   CRANBURY — A resident who has lived in town for 70 years may be proof the secret to long life is small-town living.
   Rose Tears, of Maplewood Avenue, was born March 28, 1911, and turns 100 Monday.
   She raised her two daughters in the house she has been living in for 65 years now.
   She also has five grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren.
   She had little to say about the changes over the 70 years she has been in Cranbury.
   ”Cranbury is the same always. I love Cranbury,” she said.
   ”It was a small town,” said Geraldine Stryker, Ms. Tears’ daughter, who lives next door to her, speaking of when the family moved here. “Everyone knew everybody.”
   ”When I first got here, it was a quiet town,” Ms. Tears said. “That’s all I can say. I wouldn’t move out. When I die, I want to die here, too.”
   For 37 years, she was married to Walter Tears, who died in 1971.
   Mr. Tears worked for RCA, an electric company in Princeton, and also was a deacon in the Methodist church and a volunteer fireman for the Cranbury Fire Department.
   Before living in Cranbury, Ms. Tears lived in New Paltz, New York, a town in between New York and Albany where she met her husband at a block dance.
   ”It would be like if Cranbury blocked off Main Street,” Ms. Stryker said. “It was a hometown thing.”
   When Ms. Tears was 30, her aunt, May Tobin, asked her to move to New Jersey so they could be closer to each other.
   ”I was nice and young then,” Ms. Tears said.
   When asked what the secret to long life was, she said, “I’d like to know myself.”
   She worked as a housekeeper for two local business owners — Dr. Gerald Miller, who was Cranbury’s general doctor in the 1950s and 1960s and also for Eugene Herr of Herr’s Plumbing and Heating, which is still in town.
   When she first started, she made 75 cents an hour, and worked up to $20 a day for working three hours a day. She also was raising her two daughters at the time.
   ”She worked only housekeeping so she could be home by two or three when the kids came home from school,” Ms. Stryker said.
   ”I worked right up until I was 70,” Ms. Tears said.
   She also explained how life in New York State was a bit different when she lived there.
   ”My mother and father were farmers,” she said. “We used to work out in the fields with them.”
   She went to school until fourth or fifth grade, then stopped going to school so she could work on the farm.
   In Cranbury, she has had some good times and some tough times. Among those tough times were the tragedies of losing her husband and daughter.
   Her oldest daughter, Virginia Croshaw, had heart disease and diabetes and died at age 55 in 2000. Mr. Tears also died of heart disease at 57.
   ”It was pretty rough. I was here by myself,” she said. “I got along, though.”
   She also has been through a handful of life-threatening illnesses. She has survived pneumonia five times, and she has survived Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder that causes the immune system to attack the peripheral nervous system. The syndrome paralyzed her for about a year about 30 years ago. During that time she was treated at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital, New Brunswick.
   But she got through it and has led a healthy life overall.
   ”I’ve never had an operation. Thank God,” she said.
   Life went by too fast, she added.
   ”I’d like to stay here a long time, but I’m not going to,” Ms. Tears said. “I lived a good life. Sometimes, I had it hard like anybody else.”
   She said some of her best memories are going to different places with her husband and kids.
   ”We went to the shore, back to New York,” she said. “That’s all. Nothing big.”
   Although many things have changed in her lifetime, she only had good things to say about the new generation.
   ”I love them all,” she said. “I got a lot of love.”