RIVER CITY JOURNAL: SMILING AUDREY IS A CENTERFOLD AT AGE 100

Imagine your surprise. While leafing through one of the many national magazines that come to your mailbox, you saw someone you know. How often does that happen?

This magazine happened to be People. You know, the weekly compendium of current show-biz events, weighty analysis of movie plot lines, peek-a-boo photos of glamorati at parties, penetrating articles about the major Hollywood philosophers of our time -- all this plus urgent updates on the love lives, marriage plans and divorce rates of People Who Are Really, Really Important and Special.

This week's issue of People is a thick one. In addition to the usual stuff, there is a diet-and-fitness section of more than 50 pages that appears to be sponsored by the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board (this isn't made up, and you can check for yourself). The section is interspersed with those ads that have taken over slick magazines like Republicans swarming over Congress. Do you think there is a connection? You know the ads. They show some of the People Who Are Really, Really, Important and Special with white milk mustaches, making it look as if these PWARRIS have just gulped down a lusty glass of processed fluid milk.

For the most part, the folks featured in the milk ads are young and healthy. Well, maybe not Joan Rivers. After all, the fluid milk processors want readers to believe that milk is an elixir. Old crones and haggard alcoholics with emphysema probably aren't what the milk pushers want to portray.

Now the good part. The part about someone you know.

If the milk gurus wanted a real-life example of someone who represents the best of long life and good health, they should have gone just 13 more pages to a spread on "Unmissing Persons," which highlights some ordinary Americans who have, in their lifetimes, made an extraordinary commitment to good work habits and job longevity. The main attraction, shown in a photo that takes up most of one page and part of another, is a spry (you think this word was invented just for her), smiling, white-haired woman.

This is no average great-great-grandmother. This is Audrey Stubbart, a 100-year-old proofreader for The Examiner, a daily newspaper in Independence, Harry Truman's town.

Good fortune allowed you to work with Audrey twice, first in the late 1970s when you were executive editor of The Examiner and again in the last half of the 1980s when you were publisher of The Examiner's sister newspaper, The Blue Springs Examiner. Both newspapers are in the suburbs on the eastern edge of Kansas City.

In the 1970s, Audrey already was something of a symbol of the best of being age-advantaged. She had been a proofreader at the newspaper since 1961 -- one of several careers. For example, she and her late husband had homesteaded in Wyoming in the early part of this century. While there, she taught school. After moving to Independence, she became an editor for the publishing arm of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which has its world headquarters there and which is better known as the RLDS church. After just one day of mandatory retirement, she went to The Examiner and offered her services. She has been there ever since. And every day. She has never missed a day of work.

To her co-workers, Audrey is part grandmother, part philosopher, part grammar expert, part spelling whiz and full-time spreader of joy and happiness. She never stops smiling. You ought to see the photograph in People magazine. Audrey doesn't look a day over 65 (surely that's a compliment to a woman who is 100). And she is showing her trademark high-beam smile.

There are so many stories about Audrey. After all, over a century you pick up a reputation. The one you like best is an incident that happened while you were executive editor of The Examiner.

Audrey doesn't drive a car. She relies on coworkers, family members and taxis to get to and from work. She lives alone in a modest frame house on a busy Independence street. One evening, when darkness set in early, she arrived home at dusk and discovered a man breaking into her back porch. Did she run for help? Not Audrey. She asked the man just what he thought he was doing. The man said he was hungry and looking for food. Audrey informed him that all a hungry man had to do was to ask for food, and she would give it to him, but for goodness sakes don't tear up the screen door.

She took the man into her kitchen and sat him down at the table as she prepared something to eat. While waiting, the man reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes and started to light up. Audrey grabbed the man by the scruff of the neck and pushed him out of the house into the back yard. In no uncertain terms -- remember, she was past 80 at the time -- she told the hapless food burglar that he was welcome to eat at her table, but no one, positively no one, could smoke in her house. The cowed man apologized -- that's right, apologized -- and got his meal.

Just being around Audrey is to experience everything good about life and about growing old. Audrey has no intentions of ever retiring again. The Examiner has no intentions of asking her to leave. She is too valuable an employee. In the People magazine article, Audrey is quoted as saying, "The day I call in I won't be sick. I'll be dead."

You can bet Audrey never thought in a million years she would ever be a slick magazine's centerfold.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.