Florida
‘No drinking, no smoking and a clean life’: Centenarian twins reveal ‘secret’ of their age
When the twins Norma (left) and Edy were born, Warren G. Harding was still President of the USA
© Martha Asencio-Rhine / Imago Images
Identical twins Norma and Edy have been together since 1921 and want to stay together for a long time.
Identical twin sisters Norma Matthews and Edith Antoncecchi turned 100 last December. She has become a celebrity in her state of Florida since she portrayed The Tampa Bay Times. How did they manage to age so well together?
Every Thursday morning, Norma and Edith carefully style their hair, sometimes wear matching outfits, and go together to a church in St. Petersburg, Fla. to attend music class for seniors. With coffee and donuts, they listen to the music they know by heart, says Norma, but they also absorb the excitement that people get around them: “We’ve done everything together since we were born,” Norma says, according to the Washington Post quoted.
Warren G. Harding was President when the twins were born
The twins, who were born on December 23, 1921 when Warren G. Harding was still President of the USA, have experienced many ups and downs in their lives and survived a major scandal of their time: They were born in Massachusetts, five miles outside of Boston as the daughter of Italian immigrants. However, their father left their mother for another woman when the girls were 13, and their mother took a job in a shoe factory to pay the bills.
“When he divorced our mother, other children avoided us as if we had an illness,” Norma said in an interview with the Washington Post. “It was considered a scandal.” But that also helped them develop their toughness. They would have then just decided they didn’t need the other snooty kids, adds Edith, who is a few minutes older.
She and Norma dressed alike, pranked their teachers by switching classes, and helped babysit their little brother, John. “It wasn’t easy for us, but we had a lot of fun,” Edy says, recalling how they put on plays and puppet shows, sharing both secrets, closets, and the same brass bed.
Poached eggs on toast
Both married later, but Edy’s husband Leo, he died in a car accident in 1994, and Norma’s husband Charles are long gone. Norma prides herself in cooking healthy meals like baked salmon and poached eggs on toast. The real secret to the siblings’ longevity, however, is that they “don’t drink, don’t smoke, and live a clean life so that we can go to heaven,” she told the Washington Post.
However, they could not quite understand the media attention to their old age, as the “Tampa Bay Times” quoted them in an Instagram post. Norma emphasizes that the most important thing for both of them is that they are together: “We really have the feeling that one cannot do without the other. I would do anything for Edy. She is my one and only.”
Swell: “Washington Post”, “Tampa Bay Times”