Why did Regina Smith live so long — and so well? Her son said he knew why

I met Regina Smith almost five years ago on her 100th birthday. It was a warm August day, and though kids and family members swirled around her – fixing food, fussing over her hair and finding room for the bouquets that kept arriving – she gently waved them away if their ministrations interfered with her storytelling.

I had come to to hear about her century of life in Southwest Florida, a life I recently learned came to an end last month, shortly before she’d have turned 105.

Allow me to just say up front: The woman was a marvel. Not just because of her sly sense of humor or her cheerful willingness to hike a still-limber leg up behind her head; it was how she welcomed a complete stranger to sit elbow-to-elbow at her kitchen table as she spoke of her extraordinary life.

Her memories of it began on Sanibel, when the island was still unbridged and full of tomato, pepper and cabbage fields.

"My daddy was a farmer," Regina told me. "When I was little, I'd help him set out the plants and water them. For dinner, he'd go and kill a rabbit and Mama would cook it. Or fish. We had no refrigerator — not even an icebox — so Mama would salt the fish to dry them, then before we ate them, she'd soak them to get the salt out. We had fried fish, stewed fish, baked fish. And you know what? I still like fish."

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Maybe it was all the fresh island air and hard work. Maybe it was all the Omega 3. Maybe a lifetime of temperance – “I never smoked or drank alcohol; I don't even like the taste of coffee," she said. Whatever it was, Regina  radiated health.

Or maybe, she ventured with a grin, that glow came from having a younger husband. “Yes, I robbed the cradle,” she said of her Walter, then 97.

Born in south Georgia, Regina was the eldest of eight children. Her parents brought them to the island when she was very young — one of the first black families to do so — though she wasn’t sure of the year.

"I think my daddy figured he could make a better living on Sanibel," she said.

They moved into a cabin near the beach.

"We would go in the Gulf up to right here," she said, pointing at her neck, "but I couldn't swim a tad. I can't swim now. "

Though some early residents remember a period when the island's school was integrated, it wasn't when Regina attended.

"We had to walk from the other side of Rabbit Road all the way to school," she recalled — about a five-mile trek one way. She stayed until the eighth grade, "Then I quit. I got married when I was real young."

That husband was a citrus worker, so they moved to a grove in rural Collier County's Deep Lake region. Her husband worked in the grove, Regina washed and ironed the boss' clothes. After a hurricane destroyed the grove, they moved to Everglades City. She went to work for the Riggs family, who owned a fish market, where they put her to work in the kitchen.

"I'm not sure how they talked me into that, but I just started cooking everything for them," she said.

She was still cooking when I visited with her: banana nut cake, gingerbread, peach cobbler and something the family called blackberry doobie — "like a cobbler, only with blackberries, and man, is it good," her son John, one of her seven children, said.

But while Regina was learning a new profession, her marriage was coming apart.

"My husband wasn't good, so we didn't stay together," she said, after a long pause. "He was mean — the meanest man I've ever seen."

When her husband went to find work in a distant town a few years later, "I left while he was gone," she said. "I had to get away."

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She traveled to Fort Myers, to stay with a friend. That's where she first saw Walter Smith.

"He walked by and I remember he winked at me. And I said to myself, 'Now I wonder why that man is winking at me and it's the first time he's ever seen me?' But I didn't think that much of it."

Years passed. Walter married and divorced. His ex-wife moved up north; he stayed in Fort Myers.

"One day, we met up again," she said. "I was at his sister's house. I knew he'd just been divorced, so I thought maybe he might be a little upset still. So I told his sister, 'Tell Walter to come eat with me. I want to fix dinner for him.' "

She cooked him cow tongue and pecan pie. They ate, then Walter went home. "He didn't stay with me one night until after we were married. Not one."

Walter worked for the city of Fort Myers, driving a truck, operating a dragline and digging canals. Their marriage lasted more than six decades until he died in 2016. When  I visited, he wasn’t well and Regina was his caregiver.

"He takes all my time now," she said. "He tells me, 'Geenie, I'm cold, 'Geenie, I'm too hot, 'Geenie, get me some water, 'Geenie, I want to eat.'

“So I told him I was going to change my name," she said with a laugh. "But it don't make me mad or nothing."

And that – that uncomplaining spirit of giving – is what John identified as the reason for his mother’s long life.

Sure, diet, exercise and romance were important, but there was more to it than that, he told me: "God let her live so long because she has helped - and still helps - so many people.

“She's old-school. She's always said, 'If you've got a piece of bread, give it to the other person who doesn't have one,” he said. “And she's still teaching us lessons: Do the right thing. Do unto others.”

When I asked Regina to sum up her advice to the next generation, she didn’t hesitate. “Just be decent.”