After 104 years, local maintains joie de vivre BY KAREN E. BOWES Staff Writer CHRIS KELLY staff Birthday boy Roger Larre, Middletown, greets party guests at his 104th birthday party Friday at the Aberdeen Senior Health Center, Route 34, Aberdeen. ABERDEEN - Want to live to 104? Be like Roger Larre and have 36 girlfriends. The French-born Middletown resident celebrated his 104th birthday in grand style on Friday, sitting in a circle surrounded by dancing women at his favorite hangout. So what if they were doing the chicken dance and all the dancers were regulars at the Aberdeen Senior Health Center? For Larre, his l'amour des femmes holds no bounds. "Like a real Frenchman, his true love is women," said granddaughter Lourdes Musto during the afternoon fete. "He said he's never met a woman who wasn't beautiful in some way." Even as a centenarian, Larre still has that certain je ne sais quoi that keeps the women in his life guessing, and perhaps even more impressive, listening. "Life is not worth living until you've seen Paris," he said in French over lunch during the party, all ears attuned to him. The one-time competitive bicyclist now lives with his granddaughter in Middletown but spends three days a week visiting his many friends, mostly women, at the Route 34 senior center. There he charms the pantaloons off everyone, it seems, even his personal home-health aide, Donna Scanzani. "I fell in love with him the first day," said Scanzani, smiling. "I was helping him into the shower, and he turned to me and said, in Spanish, 'You can look but you can no touch.' " The staff at the Aberdeen Senior Health Center decorated the large party room with blue, white and red streamers, the colors of the French flag. Renoir prints were hung and songs sung in his honor. "He speaks Spanish with a French accent," his granddaughter explained while the center led party games, one of which was called "How Many of Roger's Girlfriends Can You Name?" And while Larre eats, speaks and clearly thinks on this own, he occasionally needs a little help picking up a stray fork or out-of-reach spoon. Of course, the ladies in his life are all too happy to assist him. "He brings the women flowers on their birthday and on Mother's Day," Musto says of her grandfather. "He's very lovable. Very sentimental. Typical Frenchman." His life story is not so typical. Born and raised in Bordeaux, Larre fought with the French Foreign Legion during World War II. At one point, he was imprisoned by German forces but somehow managed to escape. He was 36 years old during the war. Years earlier, during World War I, Larre worked in ammunition factories because he was too young for combat duty. In 1951, he fled to Cuba after a trusted business partner betrayed him, leaving him vulnerable to arrest, Musto said. Already married and divorced, Larre met "the love of his life" in pre-Communist Cuba. He was 48. She was 39. In Cuba, he ran a farm, repaired broken Russian submarines, and earned a government medal for his engineering assistance in building a large tunnel, said his granddaughter. "Of course, then Castro came and things were not the same," she explained. During those turbulent years, Larre spent time in jail for speaking out against the government, but ended up getting a job at the prison after completing his sentence. Asked what country he considers home, Larre does not hesitate: the United States, of course. "This is a great country," he said in Spanish. "I have a lot more freedom here than anywhere else I've lived - France or Cuba. That's why everyone wants to come here." Larre came to the U.S. in 1968, at the age of 65. According to Musto, within a month he had a driver's license, a car and a job, working at a hospital in Staten Island, N.Y. His caregiver credits his longevity to his habit of drinking a small glass of red wine every day. "Salud, mucho dinero," Scanzani said, describing Larre's daily toast. Afterward, when the glass is empty, he adds, "C'est la vie." If the devilish grin on his face is any indication, la vie has been pretty good to Larre. As the chicken-dancing ladies in Aberdeen circle around him, Larre is not too old to play coy.