On her 100th birthday, Annandale resident and World War II veteran Luta Mae “Cornie” McGrath drove herself to Mass in her white 2000 Cadillac sedan and ate lunch with her priest.

Both services at her church Wednesday were held in honor of her birthday.

“I go to Mass almost every day and I try to take care of myself,” said McGrath, attributing her longevity to “good genes.”

Religion has been a major part of her life since she converted to Catholicism in 1978. She and her late husband, Thomas, traveled to Rome in the late 1980s, the only time they returned to Europe after the war.

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The Kentucky native, known as the “First Lady of Ordnance,” was the first woman to be inducted into the Ordnance Hall of Fame, in 1985, and was among the first women, other than nurses, to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Her house, where she has lived since 1960, is filled with birthday bouquets, certificates from her military service, old photos and an issue of Vanity Fair featuring John F. and Jackie Kennedy on the cover.

“I’ve always liked the Kennedys,” she said.

She says her mother “must not have felt well the morning” she named her “Luta.” She prefers “Cornie,” a nickname derived from her maiden name Cornelius during her Army service.

She has a photo of herself at age 10 with Earle Combs, who went on to become an outfielder for the New York Yankees, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. He was a teacher in the one-room schoolhouse where she went to grade school in Lee County, Ky.

She enlisted in the military in 1943, the year after Congress authorized a bill allowing 150,000 women to work in the Army. She met Thomas in 1947 while stationed as a transportation officer at the Griesheim Ordnance Depot outside Frankfurt, Germany, where ammunition and bombs were stored.

“I learned then what the war was all about,” she said.

She was sent to Berlin in 1948. She lived in a commandeered house in the American sector and worked on storing supplies and ammunition during the Berlin Airlift, when the Soviet Union tried to take control of Berlin by blocking the roads and railroads. The United States, Britain and France countered the blockade by sending planes into Berlin to provide heating coal and food.

The Berlin Airlift is one of her most prized memories from her service, second only to meeting her husband.

The Soviet Union lifted the blockade in 1949, and McGrath returned to the United States, where she married Thomas in 1950.

She retired from the military as a lieutenant colonel in 1961, when the ordnance department was disbanded.

“Recently,” she said, “one of my young doctors at Walter Reed Hospital asked me how long I served. I said, ‘18 years, one month, and two days.’ He asked me how many hours, because of how precise I was.”