Lowe’s staff in Bradley, Illinois, threw Gretchen Sollo the first birthday party of her life, at 100

Gretchen Sollo turned 100 on 1 November without ever having had a birthday party. Two days earlier the staff of the Lowe’s home improvement store in Bradley, Illinois, where she walks most days, gave her one, People and the Kankakee Daily Journal reported.

The walks

Sollo, who lives in Kankakee with her son Hugh, had a stroke in November 2018, when she was 92, and took up walking to stay mobile. For the past five years she has done it inside Lowe’s, where the floors are even and the weather does not matter. She goes round the outer aisles three or four times a visit, and the store estimates she has covered about 1,500 miles there.

“She goes around the racetrack, you can call it,” said Vicki Jernagin, a store associate who has known her since she started. Workers stop to check on her, walk parts of the route with her and notice when she does not come in at her usual time, Jernagin told the Daily Journal. Sollo’s favorite part of the store is the garden section, and staff say she can tell you about every flower in it.

The party

The store manager, Joe Jackson, met Sollo on one of her walks last year and gave her the title of store mom. When he found out she was turning 100, he wanted her to have a proper party. “It’s kind of like we’re having a birthday party for our grandma,” he told People.

At about midday on Friday, 30 October, Sollo came in for what she thought was a longer birthday walk and found about 50 people lining a decorated aisle, some of the staff on their day off, along with her family and friends. There was a blue carpet, an arch of balloons, a cake and a Lowe’s vest with her name on it. Jackson walked her daily lap with her, and she told one worker she was surprised he still had a job there.

“I never wanted a birthday party,” Sollo told People, before adding: “Means I missed out on a lot, I guess.”

A hundred years

Sollo was born on 1 November 1926 in Chebanse, Illinois, one of nine children on a farm with no electricity or running water. She worked in a factory owned by David Bradley Manufacturing and then as a seamstress known for her drapery, and kept sewing until her stroke. Her husband, Joseph, died of cancer six years after they married; they had three sons.

She puts her long life down to growing up on homegrown food, and to a glass of whiskey at night. “It’s good for you,” she told People.

“I still can’t believe it,” she told the Daily Journal after the party. “Every time I look around, there is somebody else I know.”