Daily News Tribune, MA
MetroWest Daily News, MA
Nov 16 2004

Hopkinton woman lived an eventful century

By David McLaughlin / News Staff Writer

HOPKINTON — Rose Vartanian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide as a
young girl who later ran a poultry farm with her husband in
Hopkinton, was remembered yesterday for her dedication to her family,
her love of hard work and her homemade yogurt.

Vartanian, who died Friday at 104, spoke six languages, played
three instruments and always cooked from scratch. She held
Hopkinton’s Boston Post Cane, presented to her in 2001 for being the
town’s oldest resident.

“She had such a long, full life. She was just so versatile and
did so many things,” said her grandson Dennis Robinson. “She was the
grand matriarch of the family, and everyone gravitated to her.”

Robinson, 58, said he would remember how much Vartanian loved
the beach. As a young man, he drove his grandmother from
Massachusetts to her winter home in Miami 12 times, three times
without stopping, while she gave him instructions all the way down to
Florida, he said.

Even at 93, he joked, she was driving from her home to the beach
and leaving a wake of accidents behind her.

“She lived everything to the fullest. She could go from being a
farmer to being totally dressed up,” he said.

Born in Armenia, Vartanian escaped the genocide at the hands of
the Ottoman Empire. Between 1915 and 1923, more than 1 million
Armenians died, according to varying historical accounts. She and her
family bribed their way through checkpoints during their escape by
hiding gold coins in their belts and the hems of their dresses, said
George Robinson and Jeff Doherty, two of her other grandsons.

In 1921, Vartanian and her husband, Lazarous, moved to
Watertown, where he owned a variety store. The couple, who had an
arranged marriage, Doherty said, then bought 30 acres at the corner
of West Main and School streets in 1935 for their farm, Hilltop
Poultry Farm. Doherty said she sold all her gold jewelry to help buy
it.

“I learned how to cook, how to sew, how to clean just watching
my two grandmothers,” he said. “The most important thing I got from
this grandmother is her faith in God and that there is nothing that
can set you back.”

Vartanian’s grandsons said she lived so long because she ate
well, exercised and never smoke or drank alcohol. She disliked eating
in restaurants and preferred her own food, including her homemade
yogurt, and drank a spoonful of castor oil a day.

She loved God more than anything, then came family and work,
said George Robinson. She was a dancer and a singer and played the
accordion, mandolin and piano. Even after she moved into a Milford
nursing home, she kept playing the piano for people she lived with.

“She always had a song in her heart. She’d be sitting down in
the nursing home tapping her fingers to a song or humming a song,”
George Robinson said.

Vartanian leaves her daughters, Rose Smith, of Florida and New
Hampshire, Alice Reardon of Hopkinton, and Angel Doherty of
Hopkinton; 14 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

A funeral service is scheduled for today at 11 a.m. at Chesmore
Funeral Home, 57 Hayden Rowe St., Hopkinton. Burial will follow in
Mount Auburn Cemetery, Hopkinton.