Florence Selkin, center, is joined by her family to celebrate her 100th birthday at the Middle Village Adult Center on Tuesday. Anna Gustafson/The Forum Newsgroup
Surrounded by people who had jumped state lines – and even oceans – to celebrate her 100th birthday with her, Florence Selkin was asked the inevitable question: What’s your secret? How have you lived so long – and continue to enjoy life with as much enthusiasm as someone many years younger?
“I dance,” Selkin, a Woodhaven resident, said at her birthday festivities at the Middle Village Adult Center on Tuesday morning. “I dance all the time – line dancing, belly dancing, any kind of dancing. You live and be very, very busy and stay healthy. Then, you live until you’re 100, and I plan on living until I’m 120.”
Selkin – who grew up with her parents, Joseph and Anna Cohen, and three younger siblings in the Bronx – was joined by a sea of family members and friends for a birthday marking a century of being alive – of living through both world wars and the Great Depression, of being married to her late husband, Abe, for 71 years until he died in 2005 at the age of 95, of raising a daughter, Linda, and of delighting in spending time with her four grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Of a life lived traveling to each of the 50 states, and around the world – to Spain, for example, where Selkin noted she danced “with many Spanish dancers.”
Born in 1913 – when Woodrow Wilson was president and Grand Central reopened its doors as the largest railroad station in the world – Selkin graduated from Roosevelt High School in the Bronx at the age of 15 and got married in 1934 to a man who had seen her picture in a photography shop and knew immediately he wanted her to be his wife. The couple lived in the Bronx until 1962, when they moved to Woodhaven.
A committed civic activist, Selkin was the chairwoman of the Hostess Committee at the 1939 World Fair. During World War II, she worked with a group of women to bring care packages to the soldiers before they headed to the front lines – and she organized a seven block party for the community to celebrate D-Day.
Selkin also worked with Pioneer Women, a Labor Zionist women’s organization now known as Na’amat, for which she conducted numerous events that attracted such names as Eleanor Roosevelt, actress and politician Helen Douglas, and Gertrude Berg, an actress who was one of the first women to create, write, produce and star in a long-running radio comedy-drama, “The Goldbergs.”
“She led a protest to help close a strip bar that was on Woodhaven Boulevard next to the Capital One bank,” said her daughter, Whitestone resident Linda Borsykowsky. “She’s always been an activist. She used to stand on the street corner and collect money for the NAACP.”
In addition to her myriad activist work, Selkin worked at Travel Weekly publications for 13 years, during which time she worked her way up from secretary to manager of the editorial department, where she oversaw 37 reporters around the world. She retired in 1981.
Now, Selkin spends much of her time at the Middle Village Adult Center, where she plays many a game of bingo with friends and, of course, dances.
By Anna Gustafson
