Later, the Gaisers became parents of Russell, but Joan, 92, remained their only daughter.

“I was the only girl and I wasn’t pampered,” she said.

The family moved to 155 Dunlop Ave. in Buffalo a few years after Joan was born. She remembers using a crank-style wall phone. She attended School No. 63 on Minnesota Avenue from first through eighth grade.

“It was the only school with a pool. That’s how I learned how to swim.”

She not only became an avid swimmer, but she also was a runner who ran relays at school. In her pursuit of becoming a beautician, she left school in ninth grade.

“I always wanted to be a beautician.” She was hired in a beauty shop where she remained for two and a half years.

“The reason she hired me was because I was so precise in my work.”

“I remember her talking about the Studebaker she bought,” said her oldest son, Howie.

While working in a hotel salon, many well to do customers gifted her with pieces of beautiful bone china which she and her daughter still use.

Some of her friends introduced her to Howard A. Peacock and on March 7, 1953, when she was 25 years old, Miss Gaiser became Mrs. Peacock in Evangelical Lutheran Church in Buffalo.

“Howard had a great sense of humor,” she said.

They eventually moved to Gunnell Street where she ran a salon out of the basement.

She enjoyed playing pinochle. “I remember her playing cards when my grandparents would come over,” Howie said.

Howard worked at Niagara Mohawk’s Huntley Steam Station, a coal-fired steam generating plant, until it was closed in the early 1960s. He bid on openings in Falconer and Fredonia and got the Falconer job. They rented a house for a year on Route 474 in Ashville, before buying a farmhouse and eight and one-half acres at the old Pringle Farm on the corner of Carpenter-Pringle Road and Route 394 in Stow, a property Pringle had admired every day as he passed by on his way to work.

They kept a few cows, pigs and chickens. She remembers two long rows of raspberry bushes and apple and pear trees on the property. She also tried her hand at growing strawberries. In time, the couple purchased the rest of the Pringle land which extended to Stow Road.

Even though they had always lived in the city, they embraced country life.

“They really farmed. My dad butchered cows in the barn and my mother made oxtail soup and cooked liver when it was still warm,” said the couple’s only daughter, Jill Andriaccio. “We had lots and lots of apple trees and she made the best apple pies. All the neighbor kids congregated at our house and she loved that.”

Neither of the couple had far to go to work. She converted a backroom into a beauty shop which she ran for nearly 30 years and Niagara-Mohawk bought property and moved across the road, enabling Peacock to walk to work.

Having never lost interest in swimming, Gaiser earned a Red Cross Life Guard certification and taught swimming lessons at Prendergast Point for a few summers.

They camped in tents when the kids were home and later bought a 24-foot motorhome. After Peacock retired in 1988, they moved up to a 32-foot recreational vehicle and traveled all over the U.S.

In 2000, the Peacocks moved a short distance down Carpenter-Pringle Road into the house their son, Guy, had built. Howard passed away ten years later.

They have four children. Howie lives across the road from his mother. He has been the Town Justice for the Town of North Harmony for 12 years and is a retired auto mechanic. Guy now owns and lives on his parents’ former property and is retired from National Grid. Jill lives in Sherman and with her husband and son own Coppola’s Pizzaria. The Peacocks had another child, Dane, who is deceased. They also have seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Gaiser is a member of Lakeside Chapel in Bemus Point where she attends regularly. She likes playing Chinese Checkers, eating chocolate and socializing.

“She’ll go anywhere, anytime,” said Jill.

She plays cards at North Harmony Senior Citizen Center on Wednesday nights and at their monthly all-day card parties. She is a regular at the Center’s Monday night dinners.