"Don’t just sit down; get up and get going."
Mrs McIvor was joined by about 80 friends and family members from across the country and Australia for her 100th birthday celebrations in Cromwell on Thursday. Through her attitude towards local clubs of joining ‘‘everything that was going’’, she has become well-known in the community.
Age has not stopped her from remaining an active member of the Cromwell Women’s Institute, the Cromwell & Districts Probus Club, and the local Presbyterian Church.
It also hasn’t hindered her daily strolls.
"If it’s not windy I’ll just walk around. I like to go out and look at the trees," she says.
Her daughter Glenda Clarke says when her mother is out walking, looking at gardens, she will get calls from people who have seen her.
"They say, ‘Should she be that far away?’."
Mrs McIvor lives in a house in Cromwell with Mrs Clarke and her husband Garry.
The house was once a crib, built by Mrs McIvor and her late husband Stan.
"Everybody thought the dam was going to flood everybody, so we thought we’d put up a pretty rough little place," Mrs McIvor says.
From there it was gradually extended into the home it is today.
Mrs McIvor was born Jessie Marion Elsie Mason in Dunedin, before her family moved to Bannockburn.
She has lived all over Otago.
When she and her husband married in the 1937, they moved to the small Central Otago settlement of Kokonga and then Ranfurly and Middlemarch, where Mr McIvor was a railway worker on the Otago Central Railway.
The couple had no electricity or radio, and for most of the time no bathroom.
"It got power a few months after we left.
"At first I didn’t really want to get married that young, but we were very happy in our country life."
They retired in Cromwell in the early 1970s.
The couple raised a family of four children and she has five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Mrs Clarke says her mother always had great determination.
"She’ll say things like, ‘Oh I don’t really feel like going for a walk today, but I’m just telling myself I’m going for a walk’ and off she goes."
One thing she was determined about was not living in a rest-home.
"I can do most things. I could look after myself here if I needed to," Mrs McIvor says.
For the most part, she says she just lives like everybody else, and her advice for reaching the milestone is simple: "Just keep on breathing".
