Stella Bumble recently achieved a milestone few people reach. The Seffner resident, who was born in Southhampton, New York in 1916 celebrated her 102nd birthday earlier this month.
Bumble, who has three children, 10 grandchildren, 18 great grandchildren and nine great, great grandchildren, attributes her long life mostly to genetics as her sisters both lived into their 90s. However, she makes sure to maintain her health with a nutritious breakfast of cottage cheese, juice and coffee that she makes for herself each morning.
“She loves lobster and king crab legs and loves to splurge on them when she can,” said her daughter Linda Werner, a VPK teacher at FishHawk Early Learning II, who lives with Bumble. “Her favorite restaurant is Fred’s in Plant City.”
When asked her earliest memory, Bumble recalls an addition most of us could not imagine living without.
“We got electric hooked up to our house when I was little,” Bumble explained. “How wonderful to see the lights on the Christmas tree.”
According to Werner, Bumble once dated a ’singing cowboy’ in New York.
“But he had no real job,” said Werner. “So her father told him to leave her alone and sent him away. As it turns out, that singing cowboy went to Hollywood, and we all know him today – Gene Autry.”
Bumble married for the second time in 1957 and moved to Greenport on New York’s Long Island to raise her family. She relocated to Florida later in life and lived in Hudson before moving to eastern Hillsborough County.
“Although she loved being a mother, she always wanted to be a nurse,” said Werner, who added that her mother’s favorite President was Teddy Roosevelt.
In order to keep her brain active, Bumble completes word search puzzles and knits baby hats for hospitals and homeless in New York City, but she also loves bird watching and old time westerns on television. She shops at ALDI every Wednesday with her caregivers and, a life-long Catholic, receives prayer and communion in her home every Sunday from her church, St. Francis Catholic Church in Seffner.
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