The Best Dance of Her Life: Pawtucket Native Turns 100
By LUZJENNIFER MARTINEZ Valley Breeze Deputy Editor
September 25, 2024
Read the article in The Valley Breeze.
PAWTUCKET – In the living room of her one-bedroom apartment at St. Elizabeth’s Assisted Living in Providence, Pawtucket native Rose Bissonnette keeps a vase of blue roses that her nephew gave her in honor of her 100th birthday.
She was born on Sept. 14, 1924 in Pawtucket, and got to celebrate the big day not once, but twice this month, which she said she enjoyed very much.
Bissonnette and her fellow residents at St. Elizabeth’s celebrated with cake, wine, and a performance by a magician on Sept. 13, and then she got together with family and friends to celebrate at Spumoni’s on Sept. 17.
“The place was packed,” she said. “There was no dancing room, that’s for sure.”
While growing up in Pawtucket, Bissonnette said she loved dancing, going out with her girlfriends every weekend and all night to dance the waltz, fox trot, and some jitterbug.
Asked if she had ever seen “Dancing with the Stars,” Bissonnette shook her head and then perked up, saying, “I don’t like to watch dancing, I like to dance myself.”
She said there were plenty of places to go, and remembers when she went to Rhodes on the Pawtuxet on one occasion.
“My father would waltz and at weddings, he’d come looking for me to dance the waltz (with),” she added. “But I mainly learned when I went out.”
She also made sure to get plenty of dancing time in on the weekends while raising her three daughters Pauline, Ann-Marie, and Susan, as a single parent after her husband Arthur died at age 48. She said she was 49 when she lost her husband and never remarried.
If there’s any advice that she would give about making it to 100, she said it would be to go dancing as much as she did, which she considered a lot more fun than watching movies, another pastime for her.
“I’ve had a pretty good life with my brothers, sisters, and own children,” she said. “You have to have fun in life.”
Bissonnette was the eighth of 16 children in her family, and she said it was great to have so many brothers and sisters and that she never fought with any of them.
“There was never a dull moment,” she said.
She remembers living on Weeden Street, off of a hill, in the only house there at the time.
“There were sandbanks around and my mother made blueberry pie from all the blueberries,” she said. “I used to roll down the hill, and it was fun during the snow.”
