FORT PIERCE FOLKS
The CENTENARIAN
BY JANIE GOULD
Retired automobile dealer Marjorie O’Quinn
56
of Fort Pierce, who will turn 101 in March,
sums up the reason she’s lived a long and
mostly healthy life with two words:
square dancing.
“I loved square dancing,” she said. “It’s very fast
and furious. When you’ve spent an evening square
dancing, you’ve really moved. Square dancing is
so much fun, and there aren’t many young people
doing that.”
She started square dancing in the mid-1970s and
for years danced regularly with a group called
Sandy Shoes and then with another one called the
Sunshine Strollers.
O’Quinn celebrated her 99th birthday on March
4, 2011, by dancing in a square dancing party at the
Walton Road Civic Center. But now that she uses a
walker to get around, she’s given up dancing.
Born in New Hampshire, O’Quinn came to Fort
Pierce with her parents, Frank and Ellen Pollard,
in 1924 when she was 12. Her father found work at
East Coast Lumber. He had been a bugler during
World War I, so he was quickly recruited to play coronet
in Fort Pierce’s band, which performed Sunday
afternoons in a bandstand at the foot of Avenue A.
“My mother used to not go to the concerts when
my father was going to play a solo,” she said. “You
know those high notes are hard to hit! But he hit
them all.”
Marjorie learned quickly that most of her contemporaries
in Fort Pierce knew how to dance. She
knew nothing about dancing, so two girls took her
under their wing and taught her some steps. Everyone
went to the Holmes Casino on South Beach
to dance.
“The boys were good, but we didn’t do the chacha,
nothing difficult. The boys each had their own
way of dancing and you followed them. That was
all there was to it!”
An only child, with both parents working outside
the home, O’Quinn credits her grandmother with
teaching her to read and write before she started
school. The family had no radio, and TV was years
away, so Marjorie spent her free time reading.
“I never realized what a wonderful job my
grandmother did helping me until it was too late
to say thank you,” she said.
Marjorie didn’t know how to cook or sew when
she married a young man from Georgia named
Osborne O’Quinn. The couple became local Dodge
dealers, and one transaction in particular remains
vivid in her memory.
“My husband went to this house in the country.
The man wanted a used car real bad. He had a
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Ed Drondoski