Last month my husband and I made another trip to The Dalles, Ore., and collected more stories from my 101-year-old mother, Gilia Peruzzo Jacuzzi.

She was in rare form, having just received the first Senior Leadership Award from the Oregon Governor's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. There was a big celebration at her assisted-living home. The governor sent his representative. The Dalles Chronicle sent a photographer and a reporter. All the residents at Mill Creek Point were on hand. My brother and sister, who live nearby, were there. And there was cake.

"You are a tremendous example through your enjoyment of life and active lifestyle," Tom Faszholz, the governor's representative, told her. It was noted that she went to exercise classes every day, sometimes walked to the store and has three garden boxes where she grows pumpkins, strawberries and garlic.

She continually tells her friends, "If I can exercise at 101, so can the rest of you."

The minute we arrived at her apartment at the Mill Creek Point home, she showed us the newspaper with her picture on the front page.

"You weren't here," she told me.

"I was in Moraga," I told her.

"You should have been here," she said.

"I didn't even know about it until two hours before it happened."

"Your brother and sister were here," she said.

"Pete lives two miles away. Esther lives 25 miles away," I pointed out.

She shook her head, but then the exercise part of the award reminded of her first year in America in 1920. She was 12 and attending Burbank Junior High School in Berkeley (which later became the now-closed Berkeley High School's West Campus at University Avenue and Bonar) along with her older sister Stella. At the time the two of them only spoke Italian and were learning English.

"Didn't take us long," she said. "I think we were able to speak and understand English in a couple of months."

She remembered well how much she loved gym class.

"We played baseball, basketball, soccer and volleyball. We had exercise classes outside on the playground. We wore a gym uniform "... white blouses and black bloomers with elastic around the leg. You could push the elastic above your knee and the material would flop over. We wore black socks and black tennis shoes."

One day her brothers' wives, Olimpia and Rina, walked by the school and saw the young women exercising. They told their husbands: "You ought to see your sisters and what they are wearing."

Her brother Rachele came to see their mother.

"He told her that we were showing too much leg. He made me cry because it sounded as if I was the only one showing too much leg. And I didn't want to wear something that nobody else was wearing."

Her father also had seen the girls exercising outside. But he hadn't said anything to the girls' mother.

"I don't think he was at all bothered. My mother asked Rachele if we, my sister and I, were the only ones showing their legs. He said 'no.' Then Mama said that Gilia and Stella wanted to dress like everybody else. And she told him that even in Italy the girls did exercises."

The story about exercising outdoors at Burbank Junior High led my mother to another memory, of dancing outdoors in her hometown of Casarsa.

"There was a wooden platform made perfectly for dancing. There was a fence around it. It was an open fence, you could see people dance. There was a violinist, an accordionist, a mandolin and a guitar. There were always three or four musicians. The dancers would wear their Sunday clothes that they went to church in. The girls wore very colorful skirts with stripes going around the bottom.

"There were seats all around the dance platform. Sometimes my sisters would take me. My sister Ancilla didn't really want me to go because she didn't want to have to watch me. She wanted to dance."

Gilia remembered two of her brothers, Gelindo and Giocondo (there were seven in all), quarreling.

"We only had one bicycle. And one Sunday would be Gelindo's turn and the next Sunday would be Giocondo's. Gelindo was 18 and Giocondo was 16. They both wanted the bicycle to go to the dance. My mother had this stick she stirred the polenta with. She hit both of them. Gelindo could always finagle something so that Giocondo would give him the bicycle."

Next week: Gilia remembers World War I and recommends a good book.

Nilda Rego's Days Gone By appears Sunday in A&E. Reach her at nildarego@comcast.net.