Dorothy Boggess starts every day the same way: with exercises in her kitchen.
She plugs in an old boom box and hits play on the “Cha Cha Slide.” Then she stands with a hand on the counter, swinging one leg and then the other back and forth. When DJ Casper asks how low she can go, she bends her knees and sinks her hips and shimmies, laughing. On her shelf is a mug that says “109 and fabulous.”
Reaching this age puts Boggess in an exclusive club. Just 0.03 percent of Americans live into their 100s. But Boggess is lucky enough that one of them is her friend of more than eight decades, Velma Long.
Long celebrated her 109th birthday this month by inviting Boggess to church with her. (Long went to Boggess’s church for her 109th birthday, in May.) Both wore sensible shoes on their birthdays this year, but Long’s daughter noted that her mom was dancing in heels on her 100th birthday.
Called to serve
In the early 1940s, Boggess was in Atlanta studying social work when she decided to come to Washington to join the war effort.
Both Boggess and Long were “Rosie the Riveters” — women who joined the workforce during World War II to help fill the factory lines, shipyards and offices vacated by the young men sent overseas.
“It was very exciting,” Boggess said. “I didn’t know anyone at all in Washington, D.C.” She took the train up, and a friend of a friend picked her up from Union Station, bringing her along on an errand in Baltimore before taking her home.
“That was really exciting — to go to a whole other state. Of course, now we know Baltimore is nowhere. But to me, that was a really big deal,” Boggess said, laughing.
Both Boggess and Long went to work as clerk typists for the government — Long for the Navy and Boggess for what was then called the War Department, earning a salary of $1,440 annually. They met their husbands through work, and their respective romances started with lunch dates.
“We used to walk over to the Interior Department at lunchtime because it was not segregated,” Boggess said. “The food was better.”
It was soon after that Boggess and Long met each other and became fast friends. Their husbands were cousins and were very close, so nearly every date was a double date.
“My husband loved her husband,” Boggess said. “We spent a lot of time together and traveled everywhere.”
Boggess and her husband were very involved in the civil rights movement, and her home is full of mementos from that era. At the time, she didn’t realize she was helping make history.
“I was just having fun,” Boggess said.
In the late 1990s, The Washington Post ran a story about women known as “The War Girls” for their role in World War II, but the piece referred only to White women. Boggess wrote a letter to the editor correcting the record, and it ran in the paper the following month.
Friendship and humor
For more than 80 years now, Boggess and Long have lived near each other in and around D.C. When they were younger, they went to exercise classes together and threw parties for the kids’ birthdays in Boggess’s backyard. It’s harder to get together as often now, but they check in by phone almost every day.
“We’ve both lost so many close friends,” Boggess said. “It’s amazing that we’re still functioning.”
They exercise and eat well, but when asked about the secret to their longevity, they say it’s being social. And while they’ve made many friends through church and their kids and grandkids (Long has a great-great-granddaughter, age 4), there’s something different about a friend who has known you since you were 23.
“They’ve been friends for years,” said Kenneth Boggess, Boggess’s son. “They are close, and they can relate to one another.”
Dorothy Boggess still makes Long laugh like no one else. But they stay engaged with the world outside, too.
“I go out with my daughter a lot,” Long said. “She always insists that I come along. I say, ‘I’m really too old.’ She says, ‘No, you’re not. People love to see you — to see a person that’s your age.’”
“All my friends say she’s their mom, too, now,” said Long’s daughter, Phyllis Valentine, 78.
Both Long and Boggess have been involved with their churches, neighborhoods, social clubs and sororities. They stay as active as possible, and Boggess learned to swim later in life, at age 69, which she said is her proudest accomplishment.
“All I can say is I’m very proud of her,” Kenneth Boggess said of his mom. “I’m proud of the people who have supported her.”
Both Dorothy Boggess and Long have traveled extensively since retiring from careers in social work in the 1970s: Boggess has a list of the countries she’s visited on the wall in her basement, in alphabetical order, from Argentina to Turkey. Long loved Bermuda, Montreal and Hawaii.
“She loves to fly,” Valentine said of her mom. Valentine brought Long to Texas last year for a celebration at Long’s college marking the school’s 150th anniversary. “As we were descending into Austin, she was looking out the window just like a little kid. And I asked her, I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ She said, ‘I just never thought I’d get to come back.’”
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