At 103 years old, Lorene Kruse says she has the secret to living a long and healthy life.
“My biggest secret I have is loving the Lord. Every night and every day,” Lorene said. “I get up every morning and I thank the Lord and ask him to give me strength, courage and faith for the day. That’s what I live by. And I have to have that because I know that he supplies my health, my air I breathe, this little apartment. Everything I have belongs to him.”
Lorene was born January 12, 1920, the middle child of three children. At the age of nine, her mother passed and her father was in a hospital with Huntingston’s disease, so the siblings were split up and sent to live with relatives. She was sent to live with her aunt and stayed through school.
After she graduated Simms School in 1938, a Simms school teacher, Edith Mosley, hired the then 18-year-old to help with her first born. Lorene was engaged to her soon to be husband James at the time.
“I stayed with her for about three months and then we got married. We lived with his mother and daddy for about seven months because he got burned and wasn’t able to work. That was during the Depression. There wasn’t much money anywhere or jobs either,” Lorene recalled.
The pair rented their first home just outside of Simms, Texas, and welcomed their first child, a son James, in 1940. They would go on to have three more children, sons Harold and Donald and daughter Pam, which were raised in the home they purchased in Simms. The couple spent their 75 years together in their family home until James’ death in 2014.
James ended up working for and retiring from Red River Army Depot while Lorene kept the home, raised their children and taught Sunday school.
“Everybody wanted me to get on at Red River. One of my best friends said, ‘Why don’t you get on there and make you some money and get you a job?’ I told her, ‘I have a job, I’ve got children to raise.’ One of the reasons I wanted to do that was because my mother wasn’t at home when I would come home from school after she passed. I was going to be there for my children when they came home from school or when they were sick,” she said. “I taught Sunday School most of my life … I enjoyed teaching Sunday School. That was my calling.”
Lorene and James watched their sons enter into military service and their daughter become an educator. They welcomed eight grandchildren, seven girls and one boy, and 12 great-grandchildren together.
“We started out poor … but we made it with the Lord’s help,” she said.
James and his wife Jane presently live near Tyler; Harold and his wife Barbara and Donald and his wife Joan call DeKalb home; and Pam and her husband Ed Knight live in Allen, Texas.
Lorene has called Oak Terrace Apartments her home since 2018.
Every morning at 7:10, residents can find her walking four blocks around her complex with her walker. And when the weather cooperates, she also walks to church on Sundays and Wednesdays.
“I get stiff, I can’t just sit,” she said.
She has a neighbor who will take her around town to run errands, to the salon and to lunch. She said she enjoys living life in her little neighborhood.
“I just love life. I’m having a good time out here just doing what I want to. I read a while, do puzzles a while, watch television a while and eat most of the time,” Kruse said.
