Dorothy Hetrick answered her phone with a voice that sounded like it was ready to laugh. It wasn’t long before she did. For a Biola alumna who celebrated her 100th birthday on Tuesday, Hetrick doesn’t sound a day over 70.

“I feel very humbled, all the fuss you’re making over my age,” Hetrick said. “I have good health. My eyesight is good. My hearing is good, and I’m very active. But I feel very humbled, like, as if I had done something heroic to make it happen, and I didn’t. My faith is the basis of everything that I have done.”

Hetrick giggled before adding that she likes to keep busy.

“I can’t stand just sitting and looking at the television all day,” Hetrick said.

Those around her say that Hetrick is constantly making other people happy. Linda Wellmerling, activities director at The Canterbury, the retirement home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., where Hetrick lives, said that she looks forward to seeing Hetrick every day.

“She’s just got the cutest personality of anyone I have ever known and just the cutest giggle,” Wellmerling said. “She likes telling jokes. She starts giggling before she gets to the punch line. She just laughs all the time. She’s a happy, happy lady. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her when she wasn’t.”

Hetrick attributes her happiness to her relationship with God, who she says has been the reason for any success in her life. She said the foundation for her faith was laid during her time at Biola, where she graduated in 1932 with a degree in intercultural studies.

It was at Biola that Hetrick met her husband, Ralph. After his graduation in 1936, Hetrick and her husband moved to Dallas, where she put him through seminary by working as a clerk at Parkland Memorial Hospital –- the same hospital where former President John F. Kennedy died in 1963.

Hetrick laughs when she talks about her time in Dallas, though her years there were difficult.

“Sometimes we didn’t have anything to eat,” Hetrick said. “By the end of the month we’d eat cornflakes and bananas, and that was about it, but those are the things that give you strength to take care of bigger problems.”

As she recounted her life story, Hetrick returned again and again to her time at Biola. She attributes her training there both to her ability to have the stamina to put her husband through school and the way that she was enabled to persevere through trials.

“What I learned at Biola just gave me the fabric of my life: the f-a-b-r-i-c, fabric,” Hetrick said. “[Biola] strengthens you for whatever you do. You don’t have to go into ministry, or be a minister’s wife, but it gives you the standards you need to cope with the problems of God and the problems of the world.”

In 1942, the Hetricks moved to Bellingham, Wash., where Ralph worked in the pastorate and the two were involved in a Young Life ministry before quickly moving to Yakima, Wash., where Ralph pastured a church for nine years.

In 1955, the Hetricks met with Dr. Sutherland, then the president of Biola, while visiting Ralph’s elderly mother. Sutherland approached them about a small church in the Palisades that was in need of a pastor. The Hetricks returned to Washington after Ralph preached there for two Sundays, only to receive a letter about pasturing the church permanently.

“The Lord just seemed to indicate that that’s what we should do,” Hetrick said. “The rest is just history. That little church just thrived.”

Now a campus, church, school and the Ralph Hetrick Family Center, Hetrick beamed when she shared that the church her husband started is where her grandson will be married this year.

Soon after Ralph’s death in 1998, Hetrick suffered a stroke that left her left arm without movement and caused her family to encourage her to move into The Canterbury, where she said she enjoys keeping busy with painting and ceramics. The staff there says that she has never let her stroke get the best of her and has remained active and motivated.

Wellmerling said that Hetrick serves as a light to the people around her, making them laugh and inspiring them to keep going.

When asked about it, Hetrick insisted that the way she lives has nothing to do with her, but everything to do with the faith that she relies on. She said it was the biblical education she received at Biola that has enabled her to have the training she needed to live out the faith that has kept her going and to persevere through the things she has had to deal with.

“Who knows what your life is going to be?” she said, chuckling. “Biola trained me not only in the scripture, but in how to live the Christian life. I had no training at all, and it just made a very great impact on my life and it just planted the seed that afterward developed into something that I had no idea would happen. And now here I am 100 years old.”