Three days a week, Virginia Oliver, 101 years old, gets up at 1:15 a.m., pulls on her boots and goes to work on her son’s lobster boat in Rockland, Maine.
Her son, Max, is 76. Virginia’s father was a lobsterman; she’s been working on lobster boats, on and off, since she was 7. Her husband, who died 15 years ago, was a lobsterman.
A long time ago, Virginia worked for a printer, but she quit. She wanted to go to work on the boat with her husband.
Now, Max hauls the traps and Virginia measures the lobsters, tossing out the small ones and banding the keepers. Max says she works hard, and she’s the boss. After all, the boat, Virginia, is named for her.
Earlier this summer, she had her first accident on the boat. A crab bit her, requiring five stiches in her hand. Her doctor suggested that lobstering was too dangerous for someone her age. “Well, I don’t care what he thought,’ Virginia says. Max says her mother is tough. “She doesn’t give up,” he told CBS News.
When will she quit? “When I die,” Virginia says. See the video of Virginia and Max in action below:
