The day Mabel Williamina Crews was born - August 17, 1914 - World War I's Battle of Tannenberg was beginning between German and Russian forces, thousands of kilometres away from her home on New Zealand's West Coast. She would live through that world war, and another - surviving polio and
Ready to party: Tauranga's Willa Crews turns 105
She said the array of cards she had received from dignitaries was "magnificent".
Willa picked up a particularly posh card, complete with golden tassel, and bearing a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II in a fetching feathered blue hat.
"Ahh, there's Betty," said Willa.
The photograph was an improvement on last year's hatless card, she reckoned.
Willa recalled many memories from her long life in an interview with the Bay of Plenty Times yesterday.
She remembered sitting on the veranda giving a new neighbour a cup of tea when the Napier earthquake struck in 1931. The stove shook its way right out the door, she said.
And while a few of the details in some stories were not as easy to remember as they once were, Willa took it all in her stride.
"I'm trying to get this thing working," she said, tapping her forehead and chuckling.
Asked the secret to her long life, she said: "I really don't think there is one.
"Things will work out how they are going to work out."
Born Clarice Mabel Beale in 1914, her mother changed her name to Williamina after her father, who was killed in a mining accident when she was 6, according to an interview she gave for a 2017 book about New Zealand's centenarians called Keepers of History.
She has lived in New Zealand all her life, growing up in Mosgiel then Napier.
Willa contracted polio when she was 3 and is believed to be the oldest survivor of the epidemic in New Zealand.
The disease left her with a partially paralysed leg and a weakened arm. She wears a leg brace each day.
She married Arthur Crews in 1936. She raised their two boys on her own when he was posted overseas at the beginning of World War I.
On his return from war, the pair opened a grocery store. She recalled it was closed on Mondays and the pair would often use the day to travel around New Zealand.
Arthur died some years ago. In her later years, Willa particularly enjoyed knitting and gardening.
She was a lifetime churchgoer, attending St Columba Presbyterian Church in Matua.
Klara Luxford Rulisek, a diversional therapist at Radius Matua, said Willa received many visitors from church and the Tauranga Gardening Club.
Centenarians in New Zealand
While there is little recent official data available on New Zealand's oldest people, the record is believed to be held by UK-born Florence Finch, who died in 2007 aged 113. Madelaine Anderson was reported to be the oldest born in New Zealand. She died last year aged 111.