Winter Park centenarian has traveled the globe

For her 90th birthday, Midge Ruff boarded a helicopter bound for an Alaskan glacier. She strapped on her special slip-resistant shoes and strode onto the ice.

“It's not that much different than a airplane,” she said with a laugh. The glacier itself? “It's slippery, so you have to be careful,” she said “…and everything is sparkly looking.”

Her trip to Denali National Park capped off a decade of travels, which she started in her 80s, crisscrossing the globe from Canada to the Caribbean, Mexico to Morocco, Scandinavia to Russia.

“There’s just so many places you can go,” Ruff said, reflecting on her travels from her Winter Park apartment. “There’s so much in this world to see.”

For her 100th birthday, she helped plan a party at the Mayflower Retirement Community for all her friends and family to celebrate her century of life.

Most of her family doesn’t live locally, so she took on making the arrangements for herself, she said with a smile and a shrug.

But for the big 1-0-5, she let the Mayflower staff do the party planning. More than 100 of her neighbors filled the community’s ballroom on June 22 to celebrate Ruff’s status as the Mayflower’s oldest resident.

“It was so overwhelming,” Ruff said, clasping her hands in front of her chest, “it really was just more than I ever expected… It was wonderful.”

In the aftermath of the party, stacks of cards line the her counter and side tables. A pair of balloons float in the corner next to her carefully tended orchid plant, and a vase of birthday flowers bloom as her table centerpiece.

Waking up that morning, her 105th birthday, declared “Midge Ruff Day” in the city of Winter Park, she accomplished a goal she set five years earlier when she first entered the elite club of centenarians.

“I really felt like I wanted to be 105…. I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got to live a couple more months because my birthday is coming. I’ve got to get to 105.’ So when I woke up on that morning, I thought, ‘I made it to 105!’” she said clapping her hands in excitement.

For most of those 105 years, she said she never knew anyone who even lived to 100, let alone surpassed it.

“When I think back on it, it's amazing,” she said.

Ruff was born in Princeton, Ind. in 1911. The same year as Ronald Reagan. The year before the Titanic sunk. And three years before World War I engulfed Europe.

Growing up, her mom owned one of the first versions of the electric car. “You had to plug it in every night,” she said. Decades later, Ruff said she'd see the same car on display in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

She lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. She remembers men knocking on her family's door begging for food during the Depression, and watching on TV when the first man landed on the moon. She boogied to the big bands of the 1930s, and watched as the internet transformed the way we communicate.

Today she totes her iPhone in her walker, and takes photos of things she sees along her walks on the Mayflower's grounds.

“I'm not a whiz at it,” she said with a laugh, “but I love taking pictures with that camera. It amazes me.”

When she was growing up, she played jump rope and jacks. Today, she said, kids are busy texting and tweeting.

“That's a huge leap into the future,” she said, “and I just feel so fortunate that I've been able to see that change.”

She married her husband, Leon, in 1936. With him she'd move across the country and back again, to New Orleans and back to Illinois, where he earned the post of state director for the Department of Mines and Minerals.

In 1973, her husband was paralyzed by a blood clot in his spinal column. The pair moved to Winter Park six years later to be closer to his family, building a wheelchair-accessible home tucked by the fairways of the Winter Pines Golf Course. Ruff would spend her 60s never venturing too far from home, caring for her husband.

Ruff always made time to garden – “I like anything that blooms,” she said – and to volunteer. She started a Girl Scout troop, and served as a greeter at the Morse Museum.

“I've always kept busy,” she said.

After Leon died in 1989, Ruff got a phone call from her old friend Ruth, who lived in Wisconsin and had also recently lost her ailing husband.

“Midge, I think it's about time we traveled,” she said.

So the pair, Ruff in her 80s and Ruth in her 70s, took on the world together traveling in tour groups across the globe.

“I wanted to see some of the things that [my husband and I] would have seen together if we would have been able to,” Ruff said.

They fit in a lifetime's worth of travel over the next decade, before Ruth passed away shortly after Ruff's 90th-birthday trip to Alaska.

“When you're young, you think you have all the time in the world,” Ruff said. “I'm very fortunate, very blessed that I got to see what I did.”

The women were so focused in seeing destinations abroad, that Ruff regrets never making it to see the western United States.

Despite being in shockingly good shape at 105, she said she knows that trip will never happen.

“No way! I'm lucky to walk to dinner,” she said with a laugh.

“But I'm satisfied where I am.”