Reprinted with permission from The Press Enterprise.

Everywhere Marge Jetton goes, her mantra goes with her. Don’t eat meat. Get plenty of exercise. Stay active.

She doesn’t get an argument from her 97 fellow tenants at a retirement home in Loma Linda. But then, she lifts more weight (five pounds) in the Linda Valley Villa recreation room than all but one of them. He’s a man 20 years her junior.

Jetton walks a mile a day, rides eight miles on an exercise bike and drives a car on occasion to deliver recyclable cans to a needy local family and take magazines to a recovery center for elderly hospital patients.

She helps package and mail religious education materials one day a week and peels stamps off envelopes as a fundraiser for a gospel radio program.

She passed out books and magazines to patients at Loma Linda University Medical Center for 15 years before resigning two years ago. It is the only concession she has made to age. Marge Jetton turned 101 on Sept. 29.

“I didn’t get old until I was 95,” she says. “I don’t know why people complain about getting old.”

How old does she feel?

“I’ve never been this old before, so I can’t tell you,” she said.

There’s no real secret to Jetton’s longevity, said friend and fellow volunteer Esther Young, 96, of Loma Linda.

“I would say it’s the way she lives,” Young said. “She’s a vegetarian and she exercises faithfully every day. She lives in the Villa and they have long halls. She goes up and down those halls and gets her exercise in. That’s one way of living a long time: exercise.”

Jetton attributes her lifestyle to her Seventh-day Adventist teaching. It is a religion that puts a premium on healthy eating habits and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco.

“Getting your eight hours of sleep every night, being a vegetarian, being careful about what you eat and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Young explains. “Marge is very good at that.”

Inside her spotless two-room apartment, Jetton reads daily from her Bible and scours the library for missionary stories.

She gets a ride from Young every Monday morning to Pine Knolls Publications in Redlands, where they help package audio tapes and other religious study materials offered free to churches, schools and libraries.

They are the oldest of half dozen or more senior citizens who climb the steps of the publishing house and work around a large conference table.

“When we’re going up the stairs,” Young said, “I always call up and say, ‘Here comes 196 years.’”

Pine Knoll publisher Cherie Kirk remembers the first day Jetton came to volunteer.

“We have a big candy jar in the middle of the table,” she said. “The volunteers call it their vitamins. We keep it filled.”

“Marge used to be a dietitian,” Kirk said. “She is quite outspoken. When she first walked in, she saw the other ladies helping themselves. She said, ‘What are you doing eating between meals?’ She really got on their case. They all looked at her, and they were ready for her not to come again.”

Within a couple of weeks, they had warmed up to her message, Kirk said. And it didn’t hurt that Jetton was filling her own pockets with “vitamins.”

But there is a difference, Young insists.

“She’s eating them at home,” she said. “She’s eating them after her meal. That’s the secret.”

The 5-foot-2-inch, 130 pound Jetton summons force in her voice when she talks about eating habits and exercise and volunteerism.

“She can be pretty outspoken, whether or not people want to hear it,” Kirk said. “I suppose it spills over into other things. But you soon realize she really has a heart of gold.”

People find it hard to argue with those 100 years she has lived, Kirk says. “It kind of fills you in on history. It helps you see things from a different viewpoint.”

Jetton was born Sept. 29, 1904, in Yuba City, Calif., about 50 miles north of Sacramento.

Her father, Frederick Hodge, was a muleskinner who used a team of 16 mules to pull a harvester in the days before motorized tractors. If she was exceptionally good, Jetton recalled with a grin, her father would let her ride with him on the harvester.

Jetton’s earliest memory is of the early morning of April 18, 1906, when she noticed water splashing out of a trough in the yard.

“I thought, ‘What’s the matter with that? The horses can’t drink,’” she recalled. She was just 19 months old, and 100 miles away, San Francisco was rocking through California’s most notorious earthquake.

Jetton attended high school in Sutter City, 12 miles from home, and then enrolled in nursing school in St. Helena.

A suggestion that she missed out tasting the wine country’s most famous crop brought a stern stare.

“I beg your pardon,” she said in an accusatory tone. “Drinking? How do you keep your brains for 100 years?”

While a nursing student in 1922, she met James Jetton, a hospital orderly three years her junior. They married in 1926, two years before he entered medical school at what was then called the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University). She worked as a nurse at Loma Linda Hospital on the campus until he graduated in 1934 and set up practice a year later in Fallbrook.

They moved to Bellflower five years after that and stayed until he retired 46 years later. Then they returned to Loma Linda.

The Jettons did volunteer work at the hospital. He reported for work every morning at 5:30. She started at 8 a.m. “They wouldn’t open the doors early for me,” she said.

James Jetton died just two days shy of their 77th wedding anniversary in 2003. That’ s when she stopped volunteering at the hospital, but kept on with her daily exercise regimen and her other volunteer work.

“You have to make yourself do things,” she says. “If you don’t, you just sit there and die. That comes soon enough.”