Frances Kompus was celebrating her 100th birthday with her favorite gals: her two sisters.
And Frances isn’t even the youngest of the lot.
Her sister Julia Kopriva is 104 and her sister Lucy Pochop in 102.
Kompus had over 50 people at her birthday bash at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Atwood, Kansas.
It’s the same church where Kompus and her sisters were baptized, confirmed, and married.
“I loved it,” Kompus told USA Today. “It was a good party.”
While she was grateful for all the fanfare, that’s not what these sisters are most grateful for.
“I am thankful for us girls being together all the time, my parents and my faith,” Kopriva told KSN-TV.
Kompus and her sisters have always been close since they grew up on a farm in Beardsley, Kansas.
“I always did what they did,” Kompus said. “Sometimes that was working and sometimes that was fun.”
The girls would spend their days working the farm their grandparents started when they immigrated from Czechoslovakia.
“It was good on the farm,” she said. “I had a few geese to play with and even had some roosters I made pets.”
The sisters would run the tractor and even butcher their own hogs to eat.
They didn’t have modern tractors so they had to lug gas in 5-gallon buckets out to the field.
“We’d cross the pasture, we would walk, and then on the way back, we would stop at the creek and catch frogs, put them in our pockets,” Kompus said.
And the sisters did it in dresses because girls didn’t wear pants back then. They also survived the Great Depression on the farm eating chickens and dry beans.
“We always had homemade bread, just plain potatoes, and gravy and meat. With those cookstoves, that was hard to bake, the temperature was hard to keep. Even if it didn’t come out good, we still ate it,” Kopriva shared during their interview with KSN-TV.
The sisters say eating well is what helped them live so long.
“Well, we didn’t ever eat fancy, but we ate good food,” Kompus said, according to USA TODAY.
They also credit staying social, walking, and just the fact that they “keep going.”
Kopriva’s advice to the younger generation is:
“I think faith comes first and thank your parents, grandparents.”
She also said:
“We eat well, right? And pray and try to stay out of mischief.”
Kompus and her sisters love to sit and reminisce.
“I just remember how we used to walk to school,” Pochop said. “It was about a mile and three-quarters. It was a long walk.”
Even when the women were married and started families of their own, they still called each other two to three times a day to talk.
“We always had family holiday celebrations with the aunts and uncles and cousins and, of course, Grandpa and Grandma when they were alive. They’ve always been very close,” niece Valybe Pochop said. “They’ve always been involved in each other’s lives. That’s just pretty amazing.”
The sisters have been together for a century, they find it hard to believe so much time has passed.
“I don’t think (any of us) feel that old,” Kopriva said.
Learn more about this family’s sisterly bond in the video below!
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