Even at 100, Margaret Mahler says that her motto remains the same: “Don't look back. Look forward.''

Her conversation is still sprinkled with laughter, and she raises her arms in a gesture that emphasizes her uncertainty as to how she has reached this milestone birthday.

“I smoked, and I drank some, and I danced my fool head off,'' Mrs. Mahler recalls.

“It's just genes, I guess,” she said.

Her eyesight is not what it once was, but that doesn't bother Mrs. Mahler. “I feel good. I feel young,'' she declared.

She looks forward to the bingo games and other activities at the Franciscan Care Center, on Holland-Sylvania Road in Sylvania Township, and to field trips organized by the center.

She said she was thrilled recently when a group visited the Butterfly House in the f Whitehouse area, and someone took a picture of her while a butterfly flitted on her head.

“A woman from the butterfly house said she was twice blessed, because the butterfly had left an egg in her hair,'' Mrs. Mahler's daughter, Betty Pieron laughed.

Mrs. Mahler was born in a little coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, and moved with her family to Detroit when she was about 3.

She attended one year of high school there before moving to the Toledo area with her mother. She began working at 16.

While working at a store at Jackson and Huron streets, she met her first husband, who was a press operator at the former Toledo News-Bee.

She and Robert Gentner were married in 1920 and had two children while they lived in a home on Page Street in North Toledo. Mr. Gentner died in 1955.

About eight years later she married Nicholas DeIorio , who died about five years later.

She then married Bert Mahler, and they lived in South Toledo and wintered in Florida. The couple regularly went on cruises until Mr. Mahler died in 1990.

She moved this summer to the Franciscan Care Center in Sylvania.

During World War II, Mrs. Mahler worked at the former Electric Auto-Lite plant, and also was employed sewing draperies and slip covers for an interior decorating firm.

Her daughter said she thinks some of her mother's sewing skills were developed when it was necessary to sew clothing for the family.

Mrs. Pieron said she remembers a childhood that was fun, “and mother was always doing something. She was always very busy.''

She added that for all her life, until the last couple of years, she remembers how her mother was always reading books.

“She's very knowledgeable, She can talk about almost anything,'' she said.

In addition to Mrs. Pieron, Mrs. Mahler has a son, William Gentner who lives in Point Place. She also has four grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.

In addition to several husbands, Mrs. Mahler lived through the Depression, and other difficult economic times.

“But you just get up and keep doing what you have to do,'' she said.

Sounds like someone ready for another century.

First Published December 19, 2001, 7:23 p.m.