100-year-old's helicopter ride tops off a lifelong passion to experience all forms of transportation

POTTSVILLE — Bertie Spina had ridden on every form of transportation from a 1937 Chevy with a rumble seat to a hydrofoil, but as she approached her 100th birthday there was one vehicle that had escaped her — a helicopter.

On April 6, a week after she turned 100, Bertie boarded a helicopter at Smoketown Airport for a 20-minute Taste of Lancaster tour.

“It was a bit windy,” Bertie recalled Monday in her apartment at Providence Place Senior Living. “Otherwise, it was great.”

For the moment, other than a space shuttle, Bertie’s satisfied that she’s experienced just about everything that drives, sails or flies, within reason.

She pretty much breezed through the usual trains, aircraft and cruise ships that have become everyday travel over her 10 decades of life.

Throw in waterskis, surf boards and the New York City subway for good measure.

Bertie takes her wanderlust pretty much in stride, as she does her longevity.

Somehow, like life, travel just kind of happened. She took it all in stride, Bertie said, which is how she explains being 100 and looking decades younger.

It could be argued that she inherited her love of travel from her father, Vincent Hornung, who owned the Pottsville Cab Company in the 1940s.

One of her most treasured possessions is a photograph of her father with his black-and-white Chevy cabs in front of a garage at 18th Street and Elk Avenue in 1945.

Alberta “Bertie” Hornung was born on March 28, 1924, right in the middle of Prohibition and the Jazz Age.

As a child, she rode the trolley from Pottsville to the Tumbling Run dams.

At 16, she learned to drive on a 1940 Chevy stick shift, very much like one of her father’s cabs. It would be the start of a lifelong love affair with cars.

She and her husband, the late Salvador “Sam” Spina, owned some vintage cars they exhibited at prestigious car shows in Hershey.

They restored a 1937 Chevy and a classic 1960 Jaguar XK150, a legendary British sports car.

“I couldn’t reach the clutch in the Jaguar,” Bertie recalled. “My husband had to extend the pedal so I could shift the car.”

They met when Spina was a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator during World War II. They were married when Spina, a decorated sergeant in the Army Air Corps, was home on leave.

In 1945, when he was awaiting discharge at a base in Biloxi, Mississippi, she boarded a train and returned to Pottsville to have her first child, a girl named after her mother.

The Spinas, who lived in Pottsville, would have two more children, Rich in 1946 and Salvador in 1949.

Their adventures on the road took them all over the world.

In Paris, Bertie remembered, they viewed the Eiffel Tower at night from the upper part of a double-decker bus. They had similar experiences in Rome.

On another trip, Bertie rode a cable car across Niagara Falls, an astonishing sight she has never forgotten.

A friend, Russ Keating, used to rent a plane at Zerbey Airport and fly her to Lake Wallenpaupack in the Poconos, where her parents had a recreation house.

Vince Hornung, who served in the U.S. Cavalry during World War I, kept show horses in a Mill Creek barn. As a child, Bertie rode American Standard bred horses and drove a hackney cart pulled by a pony.

Alberta “Beth” Pillus, her eldest child, recalls her mother riding a kind of boogie board across Lake Wallenpaupack, pulled by her father’s speed boat.

Then there was the ferry between Copenhagen in Denmark and Oslo in Norway, the swamp buggy in Florida and the open-cockpit stunt plane.

“My mother was very adventurous,” said Beth, a retired Pottsville art teacher who lives in Colorado. “She was ready to take on whatever was available.”

Rich Spina, 77, a retired Pottsville salesman, inherited his parents’ love of cars. He volunteers at the AACA Museum in Hershey, and owns a vintage 1988 Saab 900.

His mother’s interest in transportation was more a matter of opportunity than a deliberate action. She had an abiding curiosity about things that moved, and rarely missed an opportunity to experience them.

During a visit to the Golden Age Air Museum in Berks County, for example, they happened to be offering biplane rides. Naturally, she jumped aboard.

“If it was available,” Rich said, “she’d do it.”