Centenarian Minnie Miner is a survivor. Quitting smoking when she was 5 is one of her secrets to a long life.
The Lakeway resident was born in 1910 in Osage, Ark., where bitter winters kept Miner and her 10 brothers and sisters cooped up indoors most of the time between sled rides and snowball fights.

One year she and her sisters stole their father’s and older brothers’ cigarettes and sneaked down to the cellar of their house to smoke.
They would forget to hide the evidence of their nicotine habit, but when they returned to the basement to smoke, the butts would be gone.
That Christmas, they only received cob pipes and tobacco – no candy or treats.
Santa Claus made his point, and Miner dropped smoking like a bad habit.
“My sisters sat down and smoked in front of my mother and daddy and everybody, but I threw mine in the fire and cried,” she recalled. “I never had any desire (to smoke since).”
She enjoyed playing marbles and with dolls and dressing up in her mother’s clothes with her sisters.
If one of her brothers found a dead animal such as a frog or a mouse, they would put it in a small box and have a funeral.
“He would preach, and man he could preach,” Miner said.
She also had a natural talent for music.
When she would go to the picture shows and hear the piano accompanist, she could come home and play the same piece on her family’s organ by ear.
Sometimes her father would bring musicians from town to their farm where Miner would play with them.
“I banged on that thing forever,” she said.
Happy melodies turned to somber notes when the Great Depression struck the country.
When she was in seventh-grade, her family lost their savings when their bank shut down.
They sold their farm for one penny and moved to Springdale, Ark., where her father went to work on a horse wagon team at Welch Grape Juice Co.
Miner started at a new school halfway through her seventh-grade year, and when she moved up to high school in the eighth grade, she performed in school plays and played basketball.
One day when she was visiting a friend who was in her 90s, she met Harry Miner.
The handsome sailor from Houston wooed her while he finished his tour in the U.S. Navy.
They married in 1929, moved to Sweetwater, Texas, and then lived in Tulsa, Okla., until 1933 when he returned to Texas to work for Humble Oil and Refining Co., which later became Exxon Oil Co.
As a newlywed couple in the heart of the Great Depression, they learned to get by with the little they had.
They slept on wire mattresses with newspapers as covers, and kept metal food cans from his work on their cupboard shelves. Although the food was gone from the cans, the containers served the purpose of convincing their parents that they were getting by.
His job with Humble sent him to work on drilling rigs all over Texas.
It wasn’t an easy life, but the Miners formed a family when their daughter, Peggy, was born.
Every five or six months when it was time to move on to a new rig, the Miners would load up all the belongings they could fit into one truck and leave their old home behind.
“Everything we had was in that trunk,” Miner said.
When Humble formed a permanent camp for its workers, the Miners paid $200 to a lumberyard for enough wood and materials for a four-room house.
“We were all one big family. They treated us wonderfully,” Miner said of the camp.
As her husband continued to work for Humble, stability to came to their lives.
In 1942, they moved to Goose Creek, Texas, near Baytown where Miner started work at a department store and her husband worked two shifts on the oil field.
“Baytown is really where their life turned around,” said Peggy Annis, Miner’s daughter. “That department store started mother a new career.”
They saved up their hard-earned wages and paid $5,500 for a new six-room house with a garage and three lots.
After earning a promotion to manage a Baytown department store, Miner made many friends in the Goose Creek area, including a family with four girls that lived across the street.
Miner became like a grandmother to the girls, and when the mother of that family passed away, they knew what to do when the oldest, Nancy Hensler, sought their help.
“Nancy walked up to our house and she said, ‘Minnie and Harry, can I come live with you?’ So we grabbed her and hugged her and we said, ‘Sure,’” Miner said.
As Peggy graduated from college, became a teacher and married an Air Force man, the Miners helped Hensler get through high school and sent her to Texas Christian University.
“She was a sweetheart. She was our girl,” Miner said.
Her kind, giving nature has been more of a reward to others, but Miner said it got her through one of the roughest times of her life and has fueled her since.
The rock for a family and loved ones crumbled when Harry Miner died in their Goose Creek home in 1958.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought I couldn’t live without him because I was so in love with him and he was in love with me,” she recalled.
That night she slept outside in their car, and it took her a year before she came to grips with the grief that was consuming her and answered the question of what she would do without him.
“I decided I wasn’t going to live like that anymore,” she said.
The answer came in the form of a bunny suit.
Without a pattern in hand, Miner made a white bunny suit with pink ears that she would wear to events at doctors’ and dentists’ offices and for 26 years on visits to nursing homes, preschools, libraries and young patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center.
On many nights, she went straight to the nursing homes instead of going to her home first.
“It kept me from going home and being lonely. After I started doing for others and making them happy, I got out of that [depression]. I tried to try every day to make one person happy.”
The role came naturally to the performer-at-heart who drove around town in a pink Rambler and won Ms. Congeniality as Miss Baytown in the Miss Senior Texas pageant when she was 79.
“She was the bunny rabbit, she was a clown and she was in parades,” Annis said. “Her picture was in the Baytown paper all the time.”
Miner continued to work well into her 90s as an office manager for dentists and doctors in Baytown, but she now enjoys her days in Lakeway watching deer from the Annises’ balcony when she is not attending Lake Travis Church of Christ or visiting Lakeway Thrift Store.
More than 250 people attended her 100th birthday party at Lakeway Activity Center.
“The party went too fast. It was two hours long,” Miner joked. “I really enjoyed it. I love people.”
This love has taken her through many ups and downs through the years, but she said she has been blessed.
“I really have been happy all my life,” Miner said.