A Woman of Her Times--All of Them

Rose Freedman was born in the 19th century, lived through the 20th and strolled into the 21st in her trademark high heels and a stylishly hemmed dress.

She will be 108 in March.

“I think she really thinks she is going to live forever,” said her daughter Arlene March, 64, a Los Angeles psychotherapist. “I know she is not prepared for anything else.”

Freedman lives on her own in Beverly Hills, cooking and shopping for herself. She is something of a celebrity in her mostly retired community, says granddaughter Dana Walden, where younger senior citizens--some of them up to 45 years her junior--stop her and ask, “How do you live to be 107?”

Freedman, a fireball in a diminutive 5-foot frame, is featured in the first episode of “The Living Century,” a 13-part PBS series of biographies premiering tonight on KCET at 10:30 p.m.

Each 30-minute episode--produced by Barbra Streisand and Cis Corman, president of Barwood Films, with Steven Latham and Christopher Carson--profiles a different centenarian. Latham, 32, conceived the show after reflecting on today’s fast-paced lifestyle.

He started to wonder what it was like for people who had lived through an entire century, who had witnessed the advent of cars, airplanes, plastic, zippers, telephones, and even a trip to Mars.

He came across Freedman in a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire of 1911, in which 144 female garment workers died in a New York factory because their employers had locked them in. Freedman survived by climbing to the roof, and she is now the last remaining survivor.

Latham did an Internet search to find her.

“Of all the places in the country, she lived on the same street that I worked,” he recalled. He snuck out of work, bought a huge bouquet of flowers and sprinted down the block to her house.

Freedman has been sick with the flu and could not be interviewed for this article, but conversations with her daughter and grandaughter reveal a woman so in love with life that she has no time to think about being old or slowing down.

Born in Austria in 1893, Freedman came to America with her family when she was 15. Her relatives describe her as fiercely independent, highly adaptable, relentlessly progressive and insatiably curious. She still throws back her head when she laughs and has a dry, ironic wit.

Freedman studies Spanish and speaks six other languages. She paints and dances and has a big circle of friends. Some of the biggest events of the last century touched her life: She immigrated to the United States from Europe through Ellis Island; during World War I she saved an Austrian spy, and two of her three children were stricken with polio. Today she is a crazy Lakers fan and a serious fashion maven.

“When my mother was in her 90s, she called to say, ‘I am having the dressmaker come to shorten all my skirts an inch’ because that was the style,” March recalls. “She wouldn’t even open the door for me without her lipstick on.”

Walden, 36, is the president of Fox Television, and says Freedman is the best role model any young woman could ever hope to have. “She was a very strong advocate of my career,” Walden said. “When my family wanted me to settle down, she supported me. She’d had a career and she understood the importance of that.”

The show is seeking more centenarians at https://www.thelivingcentury.com.