A decade ago, Christine Phillips was featured on the front page of the Times & Free Press as a spry and newly-minted centenarian, living on her own and embracing the start of her second century.

On Monday, Mrs. Phillips officially reached the 110 landmark, an age that marks her as a “supercentenarian” and the second oldest living Oklahoman.

Although she now lives among a large group of friends at Countrywood Assisted Living Center in Kingfisher, she scarcely looks a day older than she did 10 years ago and welcomes each day with the same twinkly-eyed alertness.

(When Times & Free Press Senior Editor Christine Reid reminded Mrs. Phillips that Reid also had interviewed her on her 100^th birthday in 2009, Mrs. Phillips replied: “My, my, and you’re still here.” )

Mrs. Phillips was celebrated at a birthday party Sunday, where a representative of Centenarians of Oklahoma, a nonprofit which recognizes those who reach the 100-year landmark, presented her with a “Supercentenarian” certificate.

Sue Scott of Centenarians of Oklahoma said that Mrs. Phillips follows Ethel Bowens of Guthrie, who turned 110 in August, as the state’s second oldest citizen.

The oldest known person in the U.S. is Alelia Murphy in New York, who turned 114 in July.

Born two years after statehood and the year that William Howard Taft was first elected president, Mrs. Phillips has seen the election of 18 subsequent U.S. Presidents to 27 total terms of office.

She was alive at the time of the Russian Revolution and lived through the Cold War to see the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall.

She weathered two World Wars, the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918 and the Great Depression.

In her lifetime, transportation has evolved from horse and buggy to automobile, to air and space travel and to the brink of driverless vehicles.

Her heartiness and longevity are easier to understand after hearing about her own parents and upbringing.

She was born Christine Kruse, the only daughter of John and Katie Kruse.

Her mother was the daughter of Austrian immigrants and her father immigrated on his own from Hamburg, Germany, – at the tender age of 11.

John Kruse made his way to Detroit and was taken in by a woman who offered him room and board and English reading and writing lessons in exchange for his help at her boarding house.

Mrs. Phillips still talks about how beautiful her father’s penmanship was.

When his uncle died back in Germany, John Kruse used his $200 inheritance to buy the 100-acre farm five and a half miles east of Loyal where Christine was raised.

Mrs. Phillips remembers “raising a little bit of everything” on the farm, including wheat, corn, oats, barley and alfalfa, plus a few milk cows.

Cotton also was grown but the Kruse family determined the crop was not worth the amount of work it required, so it was not planted again, Mrs. Phillips said.

Although she was only 9, she remembers clearly the outbreak of Spanish flu, which claimed many lives in the county.

The Cruse family was spared, but her father, uncle and brother were kept busy burying the dead.

The worst of the outbreak came in the dead of winter, when hand-digging one grave in the frozen earth was an exhausting, day-long task.

After completing the eighth grade, Mrs. Phillips returned to the family farm and continued to help her parents there until age 36, when she married Ralph Phillips, a young man who grew up in the same area.

The Phillips family, which eventually grew to include daughter Shirley (now Luker) lived in different places around the county, including farms near Dover and west of Hennessey, where they operated a dairy with about 20 cows.

After selling the dairy, they moved to Kingfisher, but heart disease claimed Ralph at the young age of 65.

When Mrs. Phillips’ father died later at the age of 89, she and her mother moved into another house together, until her mother’s death at age 99.

Since that time, Mrs. Phillips lived on her own and even worked as a cook at Country-wood Assisted Living Center before the community became her home at age 102.

She noted at age 100 that time was slipping by faster and faster and at 110 she said the last 10 years have passed in the blink of an eye.

That’s understandable when measured against the relative slow speed of her younger years, when a trip from Hennessey to Kingfisher meant a wagon ride to Dover where she then would catch a train to the county seat.

At 100, Mrs. Phillips identified activity as the cure for loneliness and boredom and continues that philosophy at the assisted living center, where she spends time interacting with friends and still enjoys her favorite meal – fried chicken.