Put together, the four women gathered in the living room of Marie Bertsch’s apartment at Ascension Living Resurrection Village Senior Living have more than four centuries of life experience. They have lived on farms and behind shops, worked as teachers and computer operators and accounting managers.

The most important thing, they agree, is being active. They volunteer in their senior community, and Bertsch knits hats and other items to be sold for charitable endeavors. They pray the rosary and participate in the Mass celebrated in the Northwest Side community’s chapel, whether in person or via closed-circuit television.

They sit together and talk to each other “about everything,” said the youngest, Olga Hikido, 100. “Religion, politics, our families, the food here.”

“The pope,” added Bertsch, who was raised in Augustinian-run St. Clare of Montefalco Parish on the Southwest Side.

All four live in the independent living section of the development, said Judy Reyes, the community’s director of spiritual services, and are members of the informal “100-plus club.”

The eldest, Bertsch, is 106 years old. She worked as a registered dietitian in Chicago hospitals, and did research for the U.S. government on how best to provide nutrition to military personnel stationed in Alaska. She took flying lessons and earned a pilot’s license, all before serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a lieutenant in the supply and disbursements area.

“The boys all loved me,” she joked, “because I did their paychecks.”

She married in 1946 and was sad to be discharged from the Navy — “They didn’t want me anymore,” she said. Bertsch had six children, taught at St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge for 24 years, and volunteered for decades at nearby Resurrection Medical Center.

Hikido was born in Chicago and moved with her family to a farm in Michigan when she was 2 years old. She attended a one-room school and was always the only student in her grade, before being accepted at Fennville High School. She picked beans, cranberries and other produce to afford clothes for high school, she said.

Then, when World War II started, she decided to become a nurse, working at Mercy Hospital in Grand Rapids and then for a plastic surgeon who treated children with cleft lips and cleft palates.

After she married in 1947, she stopped working and raised her daughter in Park Ridge, where she volunteered in various areas, including at Resurrection Hospital, as an election judge and meeting babies from Korea who had been adopted by American families at O’Hare International Airport and seeing them on their way.

“Sometimes that meant getting on a plane with one or two or even three babies,” she said. “I would just get on the plane and say, ‘Who wants to hold a baby?’ And you know what? It was always the men.”

Sally Monsier, 101, is the newcomer of the group, having lived in Resurrection Village for eight years.

“I have a dull life compared to everyone else,” she said, before explaining that she was born in Chicago to Italian immigrant parents. Her father owned a shoe repair shop, and the family lived behind the shop until she started high school, when they got their first apartment.

“That was the first time I took a bath,” she said. “We never had a tub behind the shop. There was just the sink.”

Married in 1947, she raised three daughters and volunteered at the hospital, among other things.

Lorraine Covarrubias, 104, has spent a total of 21 years at Resurrection Village, although she moved away twice and then returned. The daughter of a farrier and seamstress, she married and had two sons before divorcing her first husband.

She started working, learned to be an IBM keypunch operator, and then worked her way up to supervising payroll for an insurance company that owned a bank and did payroll for its own employees as well as 34 other businesses.

She was already working when she met a man from Mexico. She was at a bar with coworkers for pre-holiday after-work drinks, and the man kissed her cheek under the mistletoe. When she found out he had nowhere to go for Christmas, she invited him to share the holiday with her and her boys.

Four and a half years later, they married.

“I have such wonderful memories with him,” she said. “We traveled so much.”

Covarrubias and Monsier lead bingo in the community, and Covarrubias used to lead a social club there. It disbanded after she retired as president in 2016 “because I was getting old.”