Ida Rosenblatt was retired but so active in her neighborhood that her daughter Irma said, “It was like she worked nine to five.”

Ida would go down to City Hall with Riverdale Community leaders to protest cuts to a local community center. She practiced yoga while recovering from breast cancer.

She was a regular at the Riverdale senior center, where she took tai chi classes and attended lectures. “She told me that she was working on a project called ‘reading for old people’,” Irma recalled with a laugh. “She was 87 years old but she didn’t think she was old – the others were!”

Ida wasn’t always so out-going. Her daughter said it took the death of Ida’s husband of 54 years, in 2001, to get her off the couch. “My father was more of a homebody but after he died she was never home,” Irma said. “She was in the prime of her life. I really thought she would live for another ten years.”