BERKS COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) — So much has happened over the past 100 years; imagine the Great Depression dominating your childhood, World War Two dominating your twenties and you’re still marking milestones.

“Fun loving? I like fun, yeah. Different experiences like going up for that helicopter ride, that was great,” Birdsboro resident Dottie Trate said after her first helicopter ride on her 102nd birthday and when abc27 came to meet her.

Growing up in Birdsboro, the oldest of seven kids, Dottie worked hard — and happily — on her family’s dairy farm. In her teens, she met the man she would marry. Harry Trate worked on the farm.

“One time he just stopped by to talk and I remember saying, ‘that man I could live with. He’s easy to talk to,'” she said.

They married in April of 1941, and later, that December, the U.S. entered the war. She then knew her next move. “Women didn’t work then. You just didn’t do that. My husband said, ‘women are supposed to be at home. You don’t go to work.’ So that went on for two years,” she said.

But she kept hearing on the radio — women were needed in factories, and she finally convinced Harry and became a “Rosie the Riveter,” the nickname given to women who made equipment for the war.

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While the men fought overseas, in a factory, not farm from Birdsboro, she made sure castings were perfectly clean before being installed in war machinery. She enjoyed her new work friends, and the occasional Tom Collins! “Once a month we’d stop at a place called Rummy’s Tavern on a Friday night we worked second shift. And I learned the jitter bug,” she said.

And she did what the girls did in the 40s, she posed for her own pin-up photo.

These days, Tarte is a feature at World War Two events and people of all ages hang on her every word, which surprises her.

“We didn’t think anything of it. We didn’t think of it as being hard. It was just something you did for your country,” she said.

She’s had hard times, after the war, her brother was killed in a military plane crash. Her daughter had polio — a terrifying diagnosis in the fifties. Her late husband — diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

But Dottie doesn’t dwell. “If you think positive and do right and do good and be good, help one another. Love. Love never hurts,” she said.

What does she say about modern times? People care too much about status. Health tips?  She hardly drinks and never smoked. What makes a good life? Keep busy, love the lord and find your peace. Oh and she loves Sodoku and the Phillies!

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