Muriel Tallon insists there’s nothing special about her.
“You only need to write 10 lines about me,” she says, eyes twinkling. “Maybe five.”
Maybe a few more than that.
The first, of course, is the obvious — Muriel turns 100 on May 17.
“I don’t feel that old,” she said during a recent hour-long conversation at the assisted living facility she moved to earlier this year. “I don’t know where the time went. I really don’t.
“Things went by so fast,” Muriel added. “I don’t know how I got this old. I really don’t, because as a kid growing up I never thought that I would be 100 years old.”
She speaks directly with a strong voice, with memories of her childhood expressed as if they happened yesterday, rather than decades ago.
Muriel looks frail at first glance, standing about 5-feet tall and weighing around 100 pounds. She wears hearing aids and sometimes one has to repeat a question, but her voice is strong and loud and she does not fail to express exactly how she feels about a given subject.
She does her best to downplay turning 100, but asked her secret for longevity, her answer is quick.
“I’ve always eaten very sensibly,” Muriel said. “No white stuff. No white bread of any kind. No rolls. No white rice. None of that.”
Her ideas on nutrition came from her mother, an early proponent of proper nutrition. And to this day, Muriel takes a firm stand on what she will and will not eat.
“I like brown bread and brown rice,” she says. “I eat a lot of vegetables and a lot of fruit. Sometimes (daughter) Cindy thinks I’m a pill because I get a menu each day and she sees (an item) and says, ‘Well, I would like that.’ I said, I know, but I don’t like it and I don’t want to eat it.”
Most pastries are on the list, too; her birthday cake will mostly be eaten by others. “I’ll have a bite,” she says.
But there’s at least one exception.
‘“Strawberry shortcake,” Muriel says. “Can’t miss that. I love strawberries.”
Muriel Mae Kunzee was born in Detroit in 1923 at a long-since-closed hospital, unusual in a time when most births took place at home.
“I remember my mother saying I was there for 10 days,” she recalls. “Back then they really spoiled us. They don’t do that now. (They) throw the poor girls out after a day or two.”
She was an only child of doting parents, but grew up playing with plenty of cousins.
“They were at my house all the time,” Muriel said. “I was an only child. I had the toys.”
She met Leonard Tallon at a dance at Lincoln Park High School just before the onset of World War II.
He was born in a small town in northern Ontario before moving to Detroit to live with his sister after graduating from college in Canada.
“After I met him, I knew he was the one,” she said.
He might have been the one, but the pair took their time, thanks to World War II.
They dated for a year before Leonard enlisted in the Army. He then served in Europe for five years. While he was there, he became an American citizen.
“While he was gone, we exchanged letters,” Muriel said. “There was a period of about eight weeks where I didn’t hear from him, and I thought, ‘Oh my, the worst has happened.’ But then I finally got a letter from him.”
Leonard was discharged from the Army in fall 1945 and the two began dating again.
“We had to get reacquainted,” she said.
They married in 1947.
During the war, Muriel went to work for Ford Motor Co. in the purchasing department at its headquarters in Dearborn.
Among the executives who worked there was company founder Henry Ford.
“During those four years, the boys were all gone to war,” she said. “There were about a hundred Navy boys who were camped out near the Rotunda. Mr. Ford came into the office one day and he told we girls who were working there, ‘We have to make a party for them, because they’re a long way from home. You girls get dressed up all pretty.’ He told us the date and we went over to Greenfield Village and it was a big party. And I got to dance a waltz with Mr. Henry Ford.”
Henry Ford might have been her most famous dance partner, but Leonard Tallon had waltzed away with Muriel’s heart.
“For 63 years we were in a wonderful, wonderful marriage,” she said.
And there was dancing, a lot of it.
“We belonged to three or four dance clubs,” Muriel recalled. “My husband was a square dance caller and he did what we called round dancing. We used to do the cha-cha and all the modern dances. One of the reasons I liked him so much was because I loved to dance. And he was an exceptional dancer. He really was, and it was my luck to meet him like I did.”
After returning from the war, Leonard ran a lumberyard in Garden City and the couple eventually settled in Southgate and had two children. Dennis was born on Muriel’s 30th birthday, and Cindy followed four years later.
“I didn’t think I was going to have any children,” she said. “We were thinking of adopting.”
Muriel became active in the Michigan State University Extension program and worked for World Book Encyclopedia for more than a decade while being active in St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Southgate.
When Leonard retired, they moved to a house in a subdivision south of Howell. Leonard died in 2009, and Muriel stayed until she fell and injured her leg last New Year’s Eve.
She came down with Covid-19 while in the hospital, and was transported to several different facilities due to her age and the virus.
“I was moved 14 times,” Muriel says. “I got to know every bump in the road.”
Her final transfer came last month to a facility in Brighton.
“It’s my home now,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ll get back to my house because of my bad leg. But it’s healing wonderfully.”
She has a table and chairs from the house in her room and a mini-refrigerator with some frozen food on days when the menu in her new home doesn’t suit her.
“There’s nothing wrong with TV dinners if you get the good ones with the meat and vegetables,” she says.
I’ve known Muriel for 11 years, since moving two doors down from Cindy. But I was always under the impression that her name was Scottie.
“When I met my husband, he thought I was from Scotland,” Muriel says. “I had an uncle from Scotland and I picked up his accent when I was in high school. I could talk like a Scotsman. And that’s why they named me Scottie.”
Scot- — er, Muriel will celebrate her birthday on Saturday with friends and family at a Howell-area restaurant. Then it’s back to her room, to resume a day that generally begins at 8:30 a.m. and ends around 9 p.m. It includes visits from family and friends nearby, a daily phone call with her daughter, and nightly viewings of “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”
“I spend a lot of time in my room, because it’s one thing after another,” she says of her schedule. “I have to exercise, so people come in and work on me. I have not been looking for something to do, because there’s always something to do. That keeps you young, you know. It keeps you going.”
