Goldie Greene: ‘Behave yourself’

Goldie Greene navigates her way through a sea of aluminum walkers near the entrance to The Phyllis Siperstein Tamarisk Assisted Living Residence, in Warwick, where she lives.  “They are a pain in the neck,” she says, adding, “almost everybody has a walker.”

Her walking aid is equipped with a pink bell that she got from the staff at the home. “So they can find me,” she quipped.  

That’s not the only thing they have given her.

“Goldie likes to go around waving like the queen,” said Jo-Ann Marzilli, Tamarisk’s director of resident programs, as she mimics a royal greeting. One of the staff got Goldie a rhinestone-studded tiara to complete the look.

Greene, named Goldie after her maternal grandmother, was born on June 27, 1918. “I think,” she said with a laugh.  Now 101 years old, she grew up in Manhattan, married, had three sons, moved to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New Haven, Connecticut, before settling in Cranston, near Garden City, about 65 years ago.

She likes to watch travel shows on television.  Greene has been to Europe, China and Israel, but the place she found most interesting was Egypt, where she saw the tomb of King Tut.

On a tour of her room, she pointed to a photo of herself with her three adult sons. “You see, they all have glasses,”  she said. Greene, who does not look or act her age, has never had to use glasses or hearing aids.

Dressed in stylish red pants and a patterned blouse, with an off-white sweater draped over her shoulders, the centenarian said, “Some people never seem to get old.” Later, she joked, “I don’t feel so old unless I talk about it.”

Asked how she has lived such a long and upbeat life, she laughed and said the key is to “behave yourself.”