Photo by Joe Ungaro Sarah Densen is pictured with her son, Rob, granddaughter, Arielle, and great-granddaughter, Barr.
Sarah Densen is pictured with her son, Rob, granddaughter, Arielle, and great-granddaughter, Barr.
Sarah Jane Densen turned 100 this week.
“She eats a relentlessly healthy diet, exercises regularly and remains both engaged and prayerful,” said her son Rob Densen. “These things really work.”
Sarah said her philosophy of life is “to whenever and wherever possible, make someone’s life a little easier” and her secret to a long life is thinking about other people.
“Making everybody else happy makes me happy, making me want to live,” she said. “My children, my grandchildren, I want to see what they do.”
Sarah was born on Jan. 16, 1924 in Batavia, N.Y., the daughter of Morris and Anna (Davis) Rosen. She was the youngest of seven siblings, including three brothers and three sisters.
In 1929, at the age of five, Sarah and her family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y. Sarah graduated Samuel J. Tilden High School in 1941, where she was taught Spanish by Sam Levinson, who went on to become an acclaimed American humorist and television personality.
When pressed on the matter, she said her celebrity crushes were Robert Taylor and, later, Dean Martin.
Sarah went to Brooklyn College, where she graduated in 1945. After college, she taught second and third grade in the New York City public school system.
In 1947, Sarah married Paul M. Densen, who she met on a blind date. They lived in Passaic and Newark before moving in 1952 to West Orange, where they raised their sons, Mark and Robert who blessed Sarah with seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Paul and Sarah moved to South Orange in 1971 and in 2001, after Paul’s death, Sarah moved to The Top on South Orange Avenue.
Sarah has been engaged in a wide range of volunteer and charitable activities. For more than 20 years, she read books for the visually impaired at EIES of New Jersey in South Orange, winning their volunteer of the year award.
She also taught English to Spanish-speaking preschool students at the Valley Settlement House in West Orange. A lifetime devotee of the theater, Sarah loved to perform, stealing the show in various PTA parent productions in West Orange and as a cast member of the Mental Health Association of New Jersey’s Mental Health Players.
Perhaps her longest volunteer and philanthropic involvement was with her husband Paul in support of the Lautenberg Center for General and Tumor Immunology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a longstanding member of Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel.
Sarah is known among friends and family and by residents and staff at The Top for her warmth, wit and joie de vivre. She was the guest of honor at a tea there last week, where people sang happy birthday, Maplewood Mayor Nancy Adams presented her with a proclamation and she blew out the candle on a birthday cake.
She had a special wish, she said, when she blew out the candles.
“I wished for peace in the world,” she said. “That’s what’s most important.”
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