WEST MILFORD Over at the VanDyk Assisted Living Center on Monday the folks were lifting champagne glasses of sparkling cider to toast a lady unafraid to tell her age. Of course at 100, this birthday is quite a triumph. Louise Jacob was born April 20, 1907, on Mulberry Street in the Little Italy portion of New York City. She was the eldest of 11 children in a household where even playing cards were considered unacceptable. “I lived a good, clean life,” she said, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have plenty of adventure. When she was a child she moved to Palisades Park in New Jersey and has fond memories of the famous amusement park there. She helped her mother raise her brothers and sisters and she and her mother took in sewing and did the detail work for elaborate baby dresses. Around the age when she would have started high school she contracted tuberculosis and was sent to upstate New York to a sanitarium to recover. When she got back home she went to secretarial/business school instead of high school and got a job in Manhattan as a bookkeeper for the American Express company. At the time she started, they did all the work by hand, but during her 42-year tenure there, she became supervisor and helped her department change over to machines. She got quite a bit of vacation time there and often took half days off to spend the afternoon at one of her two favorite hobbies, shopping she’d walk for miles scouring the shops for sales or going to Broadway shows. “Back then, it was cheap to go see them. I saw Yul Brenner in The King and I’; I saw Oklahoma’ South Pacific,’ oh, just all of them.” Once, out of curiosity she decided to go to a Burlesque show to see what all the fuss was about. “I didn’t think it was bad at all,” she said, “but when it was over and the people were leaving, who do I see coming up the aisle? It was my uncle! Oh, my, if my mother ever found out I was at a Burlesque show while she thought I was at work ... I dived down and hid so he didn’t see me.” She once traveled the country with a girlfriend to see the sights of America. Louise loved to play bridge, but since cards weren’t allowed in her house she went out once a week to a friend’s home to play. She got married at age 65 to Joseph Jacob, whom she met through the host of the bridge games. Too old to have children, they decided they would both love to adopt a little girl. Unfortunately, the agency told them they were too old to be considered. But Louise had all those brothers and sisters, so she had lots of nieces and nephews to love, many of whom were among the 50+ relatives who showed up last weekend for her birthday party. They came from as far away as Chicago, South Carolina, Florida and Massachusetts. These days, Louise collects Teddy Bears (she has 85 of them) and she likes to watch the Animal Planet channel on television. She has a lively twinkle in her eye, a wonderful sense of humor, and judging by the number of people who showed up Monday to toast her century of living she has plenty of friends. “I’ve had a blessed life,” she said.