Still active after a century

   Teresa Hirschbein sometimes leads an exercise class.

   “I tell them to only go to the level where you’re comfortable,” she said. “And I say, ‘When you are happy with what you did, hug yourself’… I feel like a cheerleader.”

   Seymour Stein goes out to lunch with his daughter six days a week, plays bingo twice a week and travels once a month to the Harry & Rose Samson Jewish Community Center for its Men’s Club.

   None of this seems particularly remarkable — until you learn that Hirschbein is 104 years old and Stein turned 100 on June 16.

   It may not be as rare as it once was for people to live past the century mark, but it still is not common. (According to U.S. Census Bureau data, about 2,300 Americans were 100 or older in 1950, 32,194 were in 1980 and 53,364 were in 2010.) And it appears to be uncommon to do so and be able to be active.

   Hirschbein and Stein have their struggles. Hirschbein sat in a wheelchair when The Chronicle spoke with her in her room at the Jewish Home and Care Center.

   Stein in his room at the Laurel Oaks independent and assisted living community said he loved to read The Chronicle, but couldn’t anymore because the type gets blurry after he reads four or five lines.

   And both of them had a difficult time telling the stories of their long lives to a Chronicle reporter. They didn’t always remember where they lived when and for how long; and they often skipped forward and back in time.

   Yet they still seem able to react to things and people with philosophical acceptance or humor.

   “There’s a reason for everything,” said Hirschbein. And after he was thanked for allowing himself to be interviewed for this article, Stein said, “You don’t have to send me a check.”

   And each had a different reaction to the inevitable question about why they think they managed to live so long.

   “I’m happy,” said Hirschbein. “I have a philosophy since I was a young girl. Life is what you make it. Don’t let anyone make it for you.”

   But Stein replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t even think about it. I was so surprised. I wasn’t trying to reach 100, not until I got to my late 90s. It just came upon me all of a sudden.”

   Stein by his own account was a Milwaukee native, but when he was a child his family moved to Chicago for several years. They returned to Milwaukee when he was a teen and he graduated from North Division High School.

   He remembered his father being a barrel-maker until the time steel barrels replaced wooden ones. He wasn’t sure where his father came from originally, but he did recall that his mother and his wife’s mother both came from “the same little shetl,” or small village in Europe.

   He said that he was interested in numbers and ultimately decided to go into accounting. He studied at Marquette University in the morning and worked in the shoe department of the Gimbels department store in the afternoon, something that his daughter, Milwaukeean Nancy Klein, confirmed in a separate telephone interview.

   Stein said he completed his Marquette studies in 1940, the same year he got married to Sylvia Pack. They and her family picked June 16 for the date, which was both his birthday and that year’s Father’s Day. He recalled his wife saying to him about that date, “Look at the presents you’ll be getting.”

   Eventually, he created Stein’s Tax Service, and stayed with it until he retired in about 1985, according to his daughter. Klein added that when the two of them go out to lunch they still encounter some of his former clients.

   Klein also said he “built the home [she and her brother] grew up in” on Milwaukee’s west side in the 1950s.

   Stein belonged to Congregation Shalom and was active in the B’nai B’rith Shofar Lodge. An item in The Chronicle showed that he served as the lodge’s financial secretary during the 1980s.

   He and his wife had two children, Nancy and Mark, the latter of whom is a physician living in Los Angeles.

   Stein said that he has visited Israel twice. The first time might have been around the time of the 1967 Six Day War; he remembered it as “the year they won the war” and he recalled seeing “tanks all around.”

   During retirement, he said he spent winter months in California and that he liked to play golf.

   His daughter said her parents bought a condominium in Mequon around 1990. He said he and his wife moved to Laurel Oaks in 2008 and she died in 2010.

   “His health is great, except he’s unsteady on his feet,” said his daughter. She added that he lived independently until he was 98, but now has caregivers.

   But he still enjoys his family. “Too bad you weren’t here a couple of nights ago,” he said to this reporter. “They were all here.”

   Hirschbein was born in Chicago to parents named Sommers who had immigrated from what was then Austria-Hungary.

   They had relatives in Milwaukee. During a visit to them she met the Hirschbein family who lived a few houses away. They included her future husband, Carl.

   They married in her parents’ Chicago home, and then she moved to Milwaukee, where he was involved in his family’s livestock business. After seven years, her father became ill with pneumonia, and she and her husband moved to Chicago to help her mother run the family’s hardware store. After her father recovered, they stayed on in the business.

   After 20 years, they returned to Milwaukee, where her husband reentered the livestock business on his own, she said. She worked as a volunteer for many causes, including Hadassah (though she said she was not a member) and what was then the Milwaukee Jewish Home.

   Today, only one of her four children is still alive, Joe, who lives in Portland, Ore. She said she couldn’t remember when the children or her husband died. But she does know she has seven grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren, she said.

   She lived at Chai Point Senior Living before moving into the JHCC. She said she wanted to emphasize that “I love this home.”

   She and her husband belonged to Congregation Beth Jehudah, primarily because Carl’s family was deeply involved. But she said she had not been raised Jewish, couldn’t understand or enjoy services and eventually refused to attend any longer.

   Nevertheless, “All my life something was missing, and that was my religion,” she said. “Since I’m in this home, I’ve become so religious, you have no idea. I don’t miss a program.”