Frances Mae Duffy, who turned 100 on Saturday, leaned forward and cupped a hand behind her right ear.

"Eh?" she says in response to a question about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake she survived.

With that, she burst into laughter. The petite prankster from Central Point hears just fine, thank you.

"I wasn’t quite a year old when my folks decided to move to San Francisco," she explains after the giggling stops. "They had no more moved there when the earthquake hit. They went through that awful thing."

Stepping into a second century of life isn’t so uncommon anymore. In fact, the 2000 U.S. Census counted some 50,000 centenarians.

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But Duffy, born April 30, 1905, in Alameda, Calif., is indeed one of the few remaining survivors of the earthquake that devastated the city by the bay shortly after 5 a.m. on April 18, 1906.

Estimated to have registered 8.3 on the Richter scale, it killed at least 500 people, making it far and away the most devastating earthquake in the nation’s history.

The city of 350,000 would burn for three days before firefighters, hampered by the loss of the city’s water system, stopped the fire by using dynamite to create a fire break.

When the smoke finally cleared, nearly 500 blocks were leveled by the combination of quake, fire and dynamite.

Of course, Duffy remembers none of this: She was just a baby when the quake struck.

A retired retail worker, she moved to the Rogue Valley five years ago to be near her daughter and son-in-law, Claire and Clayton Wight of Medford. Her daughter is a retired college professor.

"My parents didn’t talk about the earthquake much," Duffy says. "I remember hearing from other kids that their parents also didn’t like to talk about it.

"It was so terrible that they just didn’t want to," she adds.

She recalls her parents talking about living in a park with other survivors.

"I do remember my parents saying The Salvation Army was wonderful," she says. "In the park, they had tents. They served meals. People went all out to help."

And there was the story of her mother, Henrietta, deciding one day to try to salvage something from the home.

"My mother told my dad (Joseph), ‘You take care of Frances. I’ll be back,’ " Duffy recalls of the story her parents told her. "She knew where she was going but my dad didn’t. So off she went.

"What she was going after was some diapers for me," she adds. "She thought there was hope of getting some diapers."

She also wanted to find her wedding ring.

"In those days, they put their wedding rings above the sink when they washed the dishes," she says.

But when Henrietta got near the remains of the family home, she was stopped by the local militia.

"They said she couldn’t go near those buildings," Duffy says, then adds, "People do funny things when there are disasters."

Her family would move to Oakland, where her father worked in a clothing store. However, most of her formative years were in Alameda.

During the 99th anniversary of the quake, she and four generations of her family visited the Victorian house and neighborhood in Alameda where she was reared. The youngest was her great-great- granddaughter Ella Marie Wight, age 1.

Duffy was among the half-dozen survivors of the quake who gathered in San Francisco to pay their respects for those who didn’t survive. According to one estimate, more than 60 survivors are still alive.

Jackson County lost its other 1906 earthquake survivor on Dec. 29, 2000, when longtime Ashland resident Don Lowe died at the age of 103. He and his father, a horse trader from Ukiah, Calif., were on the third floor of the Palace Hotel when the earthquake hit.

"I can still remember the streets of Frisco terribly broken up and dead bodies and stuff laying around," he said in an April 18, 2000, interview.

But it wouldn’t lay around long. Just nine years later San Francisco hosted the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition — the World’s Fair.

"I went there. I still remember the Tower of Jewels at the World’s Fair," Duffy says. She was referring to the 435-foot-tall monument adorned by 102,000 glass gems known as novagems which sparkled when swayed by the wind.

And just how does Duffy keep her sparkle after a century on the planet?

"Applesauce," she says with an elfish grin. "I’ve been eating it for 100 years now."

But you may want to add a dash of humor, a dose of good genes and a pinch of good fortune for having survived the greatest earthquake in our nation’s history.

Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com