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One hundred years on Earth. Ninety-five years in Tampa. Seventy-five years in the same house in Palma Ceia.

“I don’t like to move,” said Christine Scourtes ’71. “I’d have to go through my things, and that’s an impossible task.”

Yet, she knew exactly where to find a certain book among the crowded bookshelves in her house, a biography about her, written by a friend, titled Ninety-four and Running. And she can recount infinite stories from the time she was a young child in Greek school through her 100th birthday party last fall.

An estimated 300 people came to celebrate Scourtes for her centennial at St. John’s Greek Orthodox Church in Tampa, which she and her late husband Frank co-founded with others in 1956. It was the first time the church had thrown a birthday party, which is surprising, as her daughter Mary said, “Greeks are always having Greek parties.”

As for those childhood anecdotes, Scourtes describes a very different moment in time compared to how today’s kids grow up in Tampa. She remembers circus-performing neighbors who had a human-cannonball act and often practiced it in front of Scourtes and her friends.

Her father owned a restaurant, the Post Office Café, in downtown Tampa, and worked so much she barely knew what he looked like. To make memories with him, she and her siblings would pretend to fall asleep when their mother put them to bed, only to jump back out when he came home late at night with leftover snacks from the café.

Scourtes worked for the University of Tampa starting in 1948 as a secretary to President Elwood Nance. In the mid-’60s, she started taking classes to major in psychology. She was still working, and night classes were not offered, so she rounded up enough fellow students to start the first night classes at ��«Ӱҵampa.

“I’ve always been fascinated with what makes people tick,” she said of why she was drawn to psychology. As a “people person,” she fell in love with her studies and went on to obtain her master’s. Before she finished, the head of the Psychology Department offered her a teaching position.

“I couldn’t even speak; I was so flabbergasted,” Scourtes said. She was shocked that one of her mentors would trust her so easily.

She later became a counselor at University of South Florida and half-jokes that her job was “like friendship for pay,” describing genuine connections she made with her students, one of whom visits every time she comes back to Tampa from Germany.

Scourtes retired in 1997 to take care of her mother, who lived to 102, but says she enjoyed every minute of her job and “loved it the last day as much as the first.”

In recent years, Scourtes’ favorite activities have included water aerobics, listening to audiobooks and classical music and attending events with the Golden Spartans. She has traveled with her church’s aptly named Young at Heart group to Mexico, Alaska and, most special to her, Greece. She had never been there until the group went on a three-week adventure in her Mediterranean homeland about 15 years ago.

Both her parents were born and raised in Sparta, so you could say she was destined to be a Spartan. And she seems to have the power of the gods on her side.