Fergus Falls Nurse Trudy Larson Celebrates 110th Birthday, Joins Rare Supercentenarian Club

Gertrude "Trudy" Larson turned 110 years old Saturday at Pioneer Pointe Senior Living in Fergus Falls, entering a category so rare that Boston University researchers estimate only about 60 Americans qualify at any given moment: supercentenarian.

Birthday card companies stop printing at age 100, so friends celebrating with her improvised, adding a "10" to the card to reach her actual milestone. Larson's own accounting of how she got here was concise. "Oh, more than lucky," she said.

Born April 4, 1916, the third child of Norwegian immigrant parents who farmed near Kathryn, North Dakota, Larson came of age during the Woodrow Wilson presidency. She graduated as high school valedictorian and trained at St. Luke's School of Nursing in Fargo before taking her first nursing post at Wright Memorial Hospital in Fergus Falls. The city would keep her for the rest of her life.

It was in Fergus Falls that she met Ed Larson, an Otter Tail Power Company employee, and the two married in 1940. When Ed enlisted in the Navy during World War II, Trudy became a Navy wife, moving across the country and finding nursing work wherever they were stationed.

She has outlived her Civil War-era grandmother, who made it to 103, and has now lived through two pandemics. During COVID-19, at age 104, Larson gained national attention after WDAY-TV in Fargo filmed her at her Lake Alice home sewing face masks for nursing home staff and residents on a Singer sewing machine she had purchased in 1939. "I have always liked to work," she said at the time. "I like to do something."

Larson moved to Pioneer Pointe Senior Living at age 106 and remains largely independent at 110, wearing a neck collar after a recent fall.

The statistical rarity of her milestone is striking. According to the Gerontology Research Group, only about 1 in 1,000 centenarians survive to age 110. NIH research found that roughly 1 in 100,000 people born at the turn of the 20th century reached that mark. Boston University's New England Supercentenarian Study estimates 200 to 300 supercentenarians exist worldwide.

Larson summed up 110 years in four words: "I am so lucky.