“RMA – Right Mental Attitude.”

Carmelite Hubert said RMA has gotten her through the ups and downs of life for the last 100years, well that and her daily glass of red wine.

Hubert celebrated her centennial birthday Aug. 25 with a Mass and reception at Our Lady of the Lake Church.

Carmelite Hubert shows of some of the many flowers she received as gifts for her 100th birthday. (Staff Photo by Suzanne Le Breton)

While she recalled the sad points in her life – when her father died of an infection he got after a horse kicked him in the face, and when her husband died while at a religious retreat after 52 years of marriage – Hubert said overall she has lived “a very happy life.”

At the age of 8, her father came to New Orleans from Sicily, accompanied by his mother and siblings. His mother promptly left her children at an orphanage ran by nuns in Uptown New Orleans. He never heard from her again until he was 42 years old.

Hubert said that was when a knock came at their door. It was her father’s mother. Hubert recalled, with disdain in her voice, that her father’s mother had moved to Texas, remarried to a man in the oil business and started a new family.

“She was very wealthy and never came to get her children,” Hubert said, but then in true RMA fashion she waved that thought away, replacing it with the remainder of her father’s story of how kind the nuns were to him and how an old blacksmith took him in and taught him to shoe horses.

“He loved my daddy and took him in and gave him a room and taught him,” she said.

Her father got a job shoeing horses at the racetrack and across the river for the surrey service,

He did that until Hubert was very small, at which time he gave up blacksmithing fulltime and opened a grocery store with Hubert’s mother.

He occasionally still shoed horses on the side and he died after he was kicked in the face and the infection from the wound got into his bone. Hubert was 13-14 years old at the time.

“It was the saddest part of my life,” she said.

Hubert attended Sacred Heart and St. Joseph’s High School.

After high school she got a job at the Chalmette Laundry making $15 a week.

“My husband was making $25 a week when I met him,” she said.

Benoit “Benny” Hubert’s uncles owned a chain of laundry services. In 1932 they were married.

They lived for a time with their two daughters, Lynette Letty Jane, with her mother, who was ill, in a house on Broad Street in New Orleans.

The home was next to a firehouse, and she said the firemen would come over and play cards with her daughters on the porch.

“They were the best neighbors,” she said.

Not having more than a high school education herself, Hubert was determined her daughters would go to college.

“I would do anything to see them through college,” she said.

Hubert decided it was time to go back to work. She took a part time job at Maison Blanche in the draperies department.

Her boss gave her the leftover pieces of fabric, and her mother used them to make clothes for the girls.

At the urging of the companies owner, Hubert left Maison Blanche and took a job at a finance company that was located just down the road from her house.

While working there she was robbed three times.

“I made $150 a month, and back then that was big money. To us that was dynamite,” she said.

However, things in the city, living near the Fairgrounds, got too bad and Hubert and her husband decided to come look at land on the Northshore.

They fell in love with a piece of property in Old Mandeville.

They owned the lot for a year and had a house built, in 1972 they moved to the Northshore.

“Not a house was built here,” she said, gesturing to all of the newer homes surrounding her.

She said they chose the lot because of the big oak trees in the back yard.

She still loves her yard and works in it all of the time.

At one point they bought the lot behind theirs for $1,500. After he husband died she sold it for $18,000.

“I made a good chunk on that one,” she said with a laugh.

Her husband enjoyed going to Manresa Retreat House in Convent annually.

While at one of those retreats, he passed away in his sleep.

“He loved to go there and went there every year,” she said, taking comfort in that he was doing something he enjoyed when he died.

“He was a good father,” she said.

Hubert has remained active in Mandeville.

After moving here, Hubert started a sewing circle.

The group was made up of primarily ladies form the altar society, and there was one rule – you had to be doing something.

She said some did needlepoint, so knitted, other did crafts or sewed, and each week they would rotate to each other’s house.

But, she said, like a lot of things the group fell apart.

Hubert is still very active in the Altar Society at Our Lady of the Lake Church, and she helps to take care of the vestments for the Rev. John Talamo, the pastor there.

She irons and washes his vestments and does alterations and mends his clothes when needed.

Hubert’s daughter, Lynette Soules, said her mother started talking about turning 100 when she turned 90.

In addition to keeping a good attitude, Hubert said she thinks some of her other habits have contributed to her good health.

She eats a full, balanced meal every day at noon. That meal is always accompanied by a glass of red wine.

Hubert said her father used to give her a small glass of red wine everyday with dinner and she continued that tradition.

In the evening, she eats only a small meal and then watches television until late.

“I like the Hallmark channel and you know when you watch one of those shows you have to stay up to watch the next one,” she said.

And what is her next goal? “Well, I’m going to turn 101 next year,” Hubert said.

Now, that is having the “right mental attitude.”