SLICE OF LIFE: A Rose in full bloom

God willing, my Grandma Rose will turn 94 on Thursday.

Ninety-four.

Wow. I can't get over that. That was two years before women in our country even had the right to vote.

And she's every bit proud of her age, because she could easily pass for a woman in her 70s. I hope the good health/good skin/longevity gene is floating around in my DNA.

She's a spunky woman, that Grandma Rose, often with a glass of Riesling in hand and baubles — as my Grandpa Joe called them — on her wrists, neck and fingers.

But she had a whole life before I met her, of course.

Born on a snowy day in 1918, she was delivered at home by a Chicago cop because the roads to the hospital were impassable.

She grew up in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood. At age 16, she and her family found out that her father had died in a record heat wave by reading his name on the front page of the newspaper the day after he didn't come home from work.

When World War II started and the men went off to fight, she was hired to operate a crane at Ryerson Steel. And when the men returned to their jobs after the war, she was the only female crane operator kept on staff, because she was so good.

And that's where she met my Grandpa Joe. He couldn't believe there was a girl working in the crane. Day after day, he asked her out. She was a little older than him, so she kept refusing.

He wore her down. They dated and eventually married and had three kids: Linda, Larry and Jennifer. Ryerson didn't allow married couples to work there, so Grandma Rose quit and Grandpa Joe kept working.

She worked for many years at a little drug store called Walgreens, where she was — as the story goes — the first female employee to use the automated pricing machine.

It's weird to picture her climbing a ladder to the cab of a crane or wearing a Walgreens smock.

The Grandma Rose I know watches "Law and Order" marathons and knows the change girls in Las Vegas by name, thanks to hours of pulling slot machine handles at what is now Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon.

She loves watching "Pretty Woman" and reading murder mysteries. She's supportive of her kids and grandkids, always bragging about us.

But my favorite thing about Grandma Rose is that she's young at heart. She refers to other senior citizens as "old people" as though she's not one of them.

She's almost 94, but I sure wouldn't call her old.

Vanessa Renderman covers Hammond for The Times. You can reach her at vanessa.renderman@nwi.com.