Wit, spark, and tenacity: centenarian Mary Mendes has the energy of people half her age. The Wareham native, who celebrated her 100th birthday last month, certainly hasn’t let the years slow her down.

Mendes was born on February 7, 1911 in a small house behind Saint Patrick’s Church. She's only left Wareham a handful of times. At the age of five she traveled with her mother to Cape Verde to visit her grandmother. Her mother got sick and by the time they reached Praia, Cape Verde, she had passed away. Mendes stayed on the island until she finished school and came back to Wareham in 1928. She’d leave again briefly to Ohio and Pennsylvania for her husband’s work, but always returned to the town she calls home.

“It’s nice and quiet here,” Mendes explained. “There are no fights, everyone is friendly.”

Mendes maintains great physical health and is capable of walking without assistance. But perhaps most impressive is her sharpness of mind and her ability to share her memories with impeccable detail.

“There is no stopping her,” explained Sandie Silvia, Mendes’ granddaughter. When she was 96-years-old, Mendes made the one-and-a-half mile hike from her home on Apple Street to Shaw’s Supermarket on Marion Road. “She was mad at my sister,” Silvia explained.

With a laugh, Mendes noted: “I like to walk." She never got a driver's license, instead preferring to walk to work and to run errands.

Perhaps that is the secret to living a long healthy life. Or maybe Mendes has enjoyed so many years because she never smoked a cigarette or indulged in alcohol in her life. “I don’t know" what the secret is, she said. “I like work.”

Mendes has alway kept a full schedule. At the age of 17 she began working as a cranberry picker for A.D. Makepeace, where she met her future husband, Alfred Mendes.

“He used to take me to the movies for $0.25,” Mendes said, recalling the old movie theater on Main Street. The couple wed in 1928 at the Church of the Good Shepherd and went on to have three children: Fred Mendes Jr, Mary Mendes, and Joseph Max Mendes. Additionally, Joseph Sonny Amado, who came home one day with Fred and became a part of her family, has always been known as her "other son" and uncle to all of her grandchildren.

Family is big for Mendes. She left Makepeace after getting married and worked several jobs to support her family during the Great Depression. “It was tough,” she remembered. “We’d have to go down to New Bedford to buy pounds of butter and wheat. There wasn’t a lot of food being sold in Wareham. But Roosevelt turned out to be good.”

One particularly memorable job was at Stott Funeral Home, where she was responsible for cleaning around the caskets. “I cried when I left,” she laughed. “I cleaned for them for one day and then no more.” Mendes did eventually find her niche at Roland Thatcher Nursing Home. She was a housekeeper there for 35 years before retiring at age 80.

“I miss working,” she said. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that retirement didn’t slow down her active lifestyle. She cooks, cleans, and on warm days, you can find her tending to the garden.

Mendes still lives in the same house her husband built in 1937, with her granddaughter, Rita. She has nine grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren, and six great-great-grandchildren.