Anna Allin is not the typically sweet, little old lady you'd picture sitting in a rocking chair smocking baby dresses and old-fashioned bonnets.

The 84-year-old is the Fockers of smockers (as in the movie Meet the Fockers) -- a feisty character who thinks nothing of getting onstage for talent night while she's on a cruise and telling jokes for 20 minutes.

"I don't tell dirty jokes," she says. But some are a tad off colour.

Anna loves life. And her youthful face shows it. Her arms are lined with gold bracelets and seven fingers shine with rings. She has buried three husbands and she's mighty proud to tell you she has her own teeth, she doesn't wear glasses, she has no arthritis, hasn't been sick a day in her life and she doesn't take any pills. And she goes dancing three times a week at the Royal Canadian Legion in Stoney Creek.

But she also loves to smock. The Stoney Creek resident has made 3,566 smocked dresses since she started in 1952. Each dress takes 40 hours to make and takes two metres of polyester cotton. Anna used to give lessons, but no one wants to smock anymore, she claims. She has been sewing since she was eight when she lived in Hungary.

She married her first husband, Frank Hepperle in 1947. They moved from Hamilton to Trenton and started up an amusement game machine business. They had a daughter Marianne O'Shaughnessy and worked their tails off in the business for 27 years. Frank had 75 machines in action from Trenton to Oshawa and had every resort tied up on Lake Ontario, says Anna. When he died in 1974, she sold everything and got some deserved vacations. She took up golfing, played poker and went on 19 cruises. In between, she was always smocking. Anna was a widow for only four years until she met her second husband in Belleville. They were married 11 years until he died of leukemia. This time she was a widow for six years. She met her third husband in her driveway in Pinellas Park, Fla., where she has spent 30 winters.

He was widowed, too. "I brought him in for happy hour and he never left," she says with a hearty laugh. Earl Allin knew her first husband, she adds.

He died three years ago from heart failure. Anna moved back to Hamilton from Trenton because her daughter wanted her to be closer.

Is there a fourth one down another Florida driveway? She scoffs at the idea. "There's no one young enough for me."

Besides, by now she knows the routine. "At my age if you meet someone, four or five years later he can't hear or he's blind or has a cane or is in a wheelchair or scooter."

But she has lots of friends, both here and in Florida. She shops, smocks and goes to the beaches. And every Thursday night there's free chicken for seniors at Mugs 'N' Jugs, a restaurant and sports bar.

"There were five men with their wives at my table at the German American Society of Pinellas County, but over the past 2 1/2 years, they've become widows. Now we (women) travel together."

There are still lots of men to dance with when she goes out here and in Florida, but there's quite a difference between them.

"The men in Florida dress beautifully in jackets and ties, but here they wear shorts and running shoes that look like canoes," she says.

Anna is a survivor who has had fun all her life, even though it was tough.

In 1936, she and her younger sister and mother Elizabeth Fischer moved to Hamilton from Dyment in northwestern Ontario. They left Anna's difficult father there. The three moved into a hotel on King William Street. Her mother got a job as a cook and travelled across Ontario with a construction crew on contract with the CNR.

Anna got a job at 16 running the canteen for the Tuckett Tobacco Company for $5 a day.

"I got up at 5 a.m. to get the streetcar on Cannon Street so I could open the canteen at 6 o'clock." She stayed there for four years and then met Frank at a dance at the International Club on King William Street.

When Anna heads south this month, she'll sit in the sun with her boom box and tapes and smock as she rocks. She sells the pastel-coloured smocked dresses with matching bonnets for $55, tax included. They don't need ironing and they don't wear out, she says.

To order, call 905-662-6179.

sbourret@thespec.com

905-526-3305