Moorhead woman born in small North Dakota town turns 108

MOORHEAD — She says she was the first child ever born in Maddock, N.D., and she turned 108 on Monday, March 18.

Lillian Moran of Moorhead's Eventide Senior Living uses humor to describe aging, and if you ask her for advice about growing old she's as practical as it gets:

"Keep breathing."

Moran comes from great genetics when it comes to aging. Her Scandinavian grandmother had 13 children and lived to be 103.

She celebrated her 108th birthday without fanfare or a big party, and had no plans to dance either. Though she wasn't short of one-liners.

"This thing does not dance very gracefully," she joked from her wheelchair.

Before World War I and the Ford Model A, Lillian Moran lived on a farm, milking cows and working the fields. Her father was a farmer and had a blacksmith shop in the small town of Flora, N.D., now a ghost town — no population.

"When you lived there, you got involved," Moran said, recalling working on threshing crews and helping on the cook car.

And when asked about their farmhouse — it was like everyone else's back then — it had an outdoor toilet and no electricity.

"Oh, yeah it was modern," Moran quipped.

Now at 108, she gets along just fine at Eventide.

"I am very amazed, takes no prescribed medication. None," Sandy Moran said of her mother-in law.