Viva Trimmer Hirsch was -- as her first name suggests -- someone so full of vigor and curiosity that she didn't stop reading the Bible or newspapers every day until about five years ago.

When she was 105.

Mrs. Hirsch, who died Wednesday at The Arbors at St. Barnabas in Valencia, may not have been the longest-lived person in the world -- as of now, that honor belongs to Besse Cooper of the United States and Chiyono Hasegawa from Japan, both 114.

She wasn't even the oldest person living in Pittsburgh -- Flossie Carter, who lives at UPMC's Heritage Place in Squirrel Hill, turned 111 on June 6. But as local supercentenarians go, Mrs. Hirsch was in reasonably good health until the very end, her daughters said, when she died simply of old age at 110.

"She didn't have a bad heart or cancer and was very alert, although she was somewhat hard of hearing," said her granddaughter, Carole Wehmeyer of Hubbard, Ohio.

When Ms. Wehmeyer and other family members came to visit her at St. Barnabas, they would tap out questions about her life and the century she lived in on a laptop they'd brought along. "We'd ask, 'Do you remember the Titanic?', which she did."

What did she think about the laptop they used to ask her those questions?

"She never did quite get the concept of the Internet," Ms. Wehmeyer said, laughing.

There is no family history of great longevity, Ms. Wehmeyer added, noting that Mrs. Hirsch's husband, Herman, died when he was in his 80s and her only son, Richard Hirsch, died at 63, in 1993.

During a life spanning a century of huge technological advances, Mrs. Hirsch always said she was most impressed by the airplane. She traveled on them frequently with her husband, but "she really could never get over the fact they were invented in the first place," said another granddaughter, Susan Barber of Liberty, Ohio.

Her granddaughters also described a woman who was busy with her hands -- whether it was sewing Halloween costumes, harvesting apples from the trees in their large garden in Moon or canning the fruits from those trees.

"But I never saw her wearing anything but a skirt or a dress," Ms. Barber said. "She was always very proper."

Mrs. Hirsch, a 1917 graduate of Coraopolis High School, was also very active at the Coraopolis United Methodist Church, which she attended all her life.

Besides her two granddaughters, Mrs. Hirsch is survived by a grandson, Richard, of Fort Mitchell, Ky.; daughter-in-law Laurel Hirsch of Shaler; 10 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandson.

Friends may call from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. today at Copeland's Coraopolis Funeral Home, 867 Fifth Ave., when there will be a funeral service, followed by burial at Coraopolis Cemetery.