MARLBOROUGH – Mabel Belmore sat in the community room of the Marlborough Community Development Building on Bolton Street. She was celebrating her 100th birthday with cake, ice cream and several of her friends.
“I love her,” said her friend, Nadine Kantor. “She tells me all kinds of stories.”
Born Mabel Ledoux in 1924 in Marlborough, Belmore was a junior in high school when her mother told her to drop out.
“I had to go to work and pay her bills,” she said.
For the next several decades, she worked at nearly every shoe shop in the city. She also worked at the old Dennison factory and waitressed at several restaurants.
Belmore married for the first time in 1946, but she divorced a couple of years later, when she discovered her husband was having an affair with a Wellesley College student.
So “I married a Belmore,” she said, and they had two children – a son who died in 2014, a daughter who lives in New Hampshire and three grandchildren.
Recently, her daughter threw her 100th birthday party with nearly 100 relatives.
“It was the nicest, nicest thing,” she said.
The last surviving sibling in her family, Belmore is hard of hearing and losing her eyesight, but she loves to play cards, Bingo and the occasional scratch ticket.
She’s also known for her chicken soup and deviled eggs.
“She was a wonderful person, a very nice lady,” said Jerry McDevitt, who met Belmore shortly after he moved in, “and we became the best of friends.”
