Three women friends for 90 years -- and counting

GLEN ELLYN, Ill. -- When they met and became friends in Miss Lee's class in suburban Chicago, a Roosevelt was running the country.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Today, 17 presidents and more than 90 years later, Mildred Mulligan, Ann Prichard and Helen Clippinger, all north of the century mark, are still friends. They talk regularly, celebrate each other's birthdays and compare the relative merits of walkers vs. canes. And now they're set to make their debut on television -- something that didn't even exist until they were adults.

"This has become a big deal," said Prichard, 101, sounding a bit embarrassed about the fuss being made over her friendship with Mulligan, 102, and Clippinger, 103. "But I guess it is kind of unusual."

It is so unusual that when Howard Storm heard about it, he and fellow television producers David Yarnell and Sam Denoff decided to tell the women's story in a documentary. And when actress Julia Roberts heard about the documentary, she sent word that she wanted to be part of it -- not that the three women had any clue who she was.

Roberts will narrate the documentary scheduled to air later this year on the A&E network.

"We certainly have a lot of centenarians around, but to have three women who have remained friends this long, that's an extraordinary story," said Denoff, whose long television career includes writing for "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

"And it's a story about what's happened to America," Yarnell said. "The automobile, airplane -- it all happened in their lifetime."

"We have seen a lot, that's for sure," agreed Clippinger.

Lots of marbles

Storm first saw the possibilities of telling their story. During dinner one night, a friend, Barbara Clippinger, mentioned that not only was her mother, Helen, older than 100, but she lived in a West Covina, Calif., retirement home with lifelong friend Mildred Mulligan. Then he found out there was a third woman, Prichard, who still lived in the trio's hometown of Glen Ellyn, Ill.

He set out to meet the women.

"I think he came over to see how many marbles we had or didn't have," joked Mulligan.

For their part, the women hadn't given the length of their friendship much thought. It was just something that was always there, from the days they roller skated and played on the high school basketball team together, to the years, well into their 80s, when Mulligan and Prichard took car trips and cruises together.

It was, however, something the women took steps to protect. "If we didn't agree we kept our mouths shut," said Mulligan.

Over the years, they came to recognize they had something nobody outside their trio could truly understand.

"You can talk about your life and they understand," said Mulligan. "You have to have been through it to understand, and nobody else had been through it."

A new grandmother

Storm saw immediately what he had, and began telling others about the women. Someone who works for Roberts overheard him and soon the documentary had a narrator -- and the women had a new friend.

"I'm her grandmother now," said Mulligan, who met Roberts with the others at Clippinger's birthday party in November. "We are quite close."

Their story is one of great change and great endurance, both for the nation and the three women.

When they met in Miss Lee's second-grade classroom at Duane Street School, they all lived in houses without electricity or indoor plumbing.

Glen Ellyn, now a community of about 27,000, had fewer than 800 residents in 1900. The roads weren't paved back then, but since none of their fathers owned one of those "horseflies carriages," the girls walked everywhere.

It was a "wonderful time to grow up," Mulligan says, when summers were spent roller skating and winters ice skating. But it was also a time when parents watched helplessly as diseases that rarely kill today claimed their children.

In 1918, the three teen-agers and the other 13 members of Glenbard High School's senior class graduated.

Mulligan and Prichard stayed in Glen Ellyn and Clippinger moved to nearby Evanston. Mulligan and Clippinger were reunited in the 1990s in the retirement home in California.