- Associated Press - Friday, May 19, 2017

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (AP) - Bob Ruoff winces at the memory, and he and his twin sister, Hazel Anderson, share a laugh.

“The one I dropped on your toe was kind of heavy,” she admits, talking about a log they had been carrying. One end slipped from her grasp.

“It still hurts,” Ruoff says, gesturing with his hands the injury caused to his foot. “It cut a nice chunk out of it.”

Anderson sighs, “I’ll never live that down.”

And they laugh again, the familial sort that follows tales told often at get-togethers with kin.

Lost in this easy exchange, it dawns slowly to someone listening that the incident happened at least nine decades earlier.

The St. Joseph News-Press Now (https://bit.ly/2qjUddg ) reports that only about one in 4,500 Americans lives to be 100 years old, the probability far less likely for U.S. males. Imagine, then, the long odds of male-female twins celebrating their 99th birthday, which Ruoff and Anderson did recently.

Recounting the story of their birth on Easter Sunday in 1918, Anderson said the state of medicine at the time offered little to predict a plural birth.

“Mother had no idea she was going to have twins,” she says. “I don’t know if she was ready for twins.”

Ruoff chimes in on the story he heard. The doctor had been called to the family farm, east of St. Joseph, a couple of miles from Easton.

The baby boy had come into the world.

“The doctor, he thought the ballgame was over and he was gathering up his tools,” Ruoff says. “He went and checked mother, and he said, ’Whoa, wait a minute. I think there’s going to be another one.’ And here she comes.”

Anderson became the little sister by 15 minutes.

The two would remain close throughout their childhoods. The 200 acres had hogs and mules, cows and sheep.

“We had plenty of chores,” Anderson recalls. “They found something for us to do.”

The Ruoff farm resided about two miles from three different schools. The twins went to Easton School for first grade, then to Spring Hollow School for second through eighth grades.

“The horse was the bus,” Ruoff says.

After getting out of the high school in Gower, Ruoff got the money to buy a truck and did custom hauling (grain, livestock or anything that would fit) for farmers. Though he had lost some fingers in a combine accident in 1940, the Army took him for eight months before deciding they had no job for him.

Once high school at Gower ended for Anderson, she worked in some homes taking care of children. She met Elmer Anderson, who grew up on a farm along 169 Highway southeast of St. Joseph. They married in November 1941, and she followed him to various locales as he served in the Army Air Corps. They would have three daughters.

“I did a little bit of a lot of things,” Ruoff says, explaining his work history, including 56 years in trucking. In September 1949, he married Katie Hanway, a graduate of Pickett High School in St. Joseph and “more or less a city girl, but she liked the country. … She was always out in the garden.” They had six children.

Both spouses have died; Elmer in 2005 and Katie in 2009. The twins now reside in St. Joseph, Ruoff in Vintage Gardens and Anderson at The Living Community.

Living about three miles apart and much farther during parts of their lives, the two have the type of closeness one might expect of twins; the teasing, protective sort.

Both agree that so many years on the farm accounts, at least in part, for their longevity. The activity pushed them to better health.

Anderson, no stranger to a John Deere tractor, scoffed at the idea of the farm wife staying indoors baking pies for the field workers.

“I think I spent more time outside doing hired-hand work,” she says.

And both say they sometimes get ailments and, on calling their twin, discover their sibling has the same suffering.

If they disagree on any detail of their past, one or the other will eventually concede, “I’m probably wrong.”

But not on the matter of that dropped log and the gash it took out of Bob’s foot. They agree on that, and they laugh about it.

___

Information from: St. Joseph News-Press/St. Joe, Missouri, https://www.newspressnow.com

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