Bea Baker, a local Las Vegas resident and long time reader of the Las Vegas Sun, just turned 100 years old, she said she didnt smoke or drink and that there is no secret, shes just like anybody else. Friday, January 5, 2023.
Friday, Jan. 12, 2024 | 2 a.m.
On what she describes as a “cold winter night,” Bea Baker was born in Stillwater, Minn., on Jan. 3, 1924. This month, the Summerlin resident turned 100 and swears there is no secret to the feat.
“It’s just the genes,” she says. “If I knew what it was, I swear to God I’d can it. Just the genes.”
Baker’s advice to the younger generation is to “live a clean life.” She’s followed her own advice, having never smoked or drank alcohol — which may have contributed to her long life, she admits.
And, Baker adds, “You have to love people.”
Baker moved to California as a teenager. At 18, she took a job with Warner Bros. as “secretary to the secretary of the head of the financial department.” She remembers an establishment called the Hollywood Canteen. During World War II, it attracted soldiers as patrons.
“So all the servicemen would come in on the weekends,” Baker recalls. “And they would dance with the people that could work from the studios.”
Baker met her future husband while attending UCLA. Together they raised two sons before his death.
Son Jeff Baker recalls his mom being their Cub Scout den mother, but first she needed to get her driver’s license to take on the role.
The family enjoyed skiing together, which Bea Baker didn’t partake in at first. Not wanting to be left behind, at age 58, she learned to ski.
Jeff Baker points at an old photograph of a group of skiers, including family members, assembled on a mountain. “And my dad thought I picked up this woman on the ski slopes,” he said. “Until she started taking off her goggles, and my dad realized it was my mom.”
Some of Bea Baker’s favorite hobbies through the years involved raising poodles, making centerpieces for charity events and listening to classical music — which she has enjoyed since age 18 and remembers some concertos by heart.
She also learned to paint — a passion to this day.
“It was during the ’60s that there was a group of six women in my neighborhood that were all excellent artists,” Baker says. “And I didn’t know how to draw — couldn’t draw a straight line. And anyway, I joined them and I took up painting — as you see in my house, most of the paintings I’ve done.”
Her recent travels include her fifth trip to Europe, a 21-day tour she took with her daughter-in-law. Additionally, the pair traveled to Costa Rica the previous year.
In her youth during the Great Depression, Baker’s family owned a car agency — the kind that only showed one car.
“They were transitioning from the Model T Fords to like, the Studebaker coupe,” she says. “And so my brother and I used to go out and get behind these old Model T Fords, the kind that you crank.”
The car agency had some farmers as customers. As a result, Baker’s family did not worry about food and lived comfortably during the Great Depression.
The 1932 presidential race between incumbent Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt sparked Baker’s interest in politics after her uncle made a comment about Hoover having “his head in the sand,” which she didn’t understand as a child. Nevertheless, she was hooked on politics for life and is well-versed in topics such as Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
“We knew what was going on in Hitler’s realm because my stepmother’s family was from Poland,” Baker says. “And then they would send letters to their aunt in Ontario, who in turn sent letters to a cousin in St. Paul, who in turn sent it to my mother. So we were learning all about Hitler before the U.S. press got ahold of it.”
She studied political science and history in college and says both are still her loves. She remains highly informed, as a long-time Democrat and dedicated newspaper reader, saying she must be prepared for discussions.
“The reason I have to be (is) because my entire family has either their B.S. or a master’s or Ph.D.s,” Baker says. “And they call, and they want to converse with me. And if I am not up to the latest, they don’t want to talk to me.”
And Baker has plenty still on her plate as a centenarian. She is writing a book about “intimacy for the older generation,” a fictional account aiming to challenge the misconception that people can’t have intimacy in their lives in old age.
Reaching age 100 is a rarity, according to Boston University Medical Campus. It says there were 89,739 centenarians (age 100+), or a prevalence of 0.027%, out of a United States population of 336,997,624 in 2021.
Baker, though, dismisses notions that her life is anywhere out of the ordinary.
“You know, my life is really… just, I can’t say, it’s just like anybody else,” she said.
