CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- She turned 100 in December, but Mary Dattilo isn't about to fold. She's still hoping for that elusive royal flush.

On Saturday nights, she meets her cronies for poker.

It's not like you see in the movies. They don't wear eyeshades, swig beer or puff cigars. Time has lined their inscrutable poker faces, but their minds click like the chips they flick on the table. They know when to hold, when to fold and the difference between a full house, a flush and four-of-a-kind.

The ladies Saturday Night Poker Club at Edgewood Summit is the real deal.

Dattilo, the lone centenarian, is the matriarch. But her card-playing cohorts, with an average age of 91, aren't exactly spring chickens. The youngest is 84.

Apparently, you are never too old to play poker.

"It's good for your brain," said Frannie Van Cleve. In March, she turns 93.

Along with poker, Dattilo keeps her mind keen by working crossword and sudoku puzzles. "I don't hear well," she said, "but if you can see and write, you can work puzzles."

She joined the poker club when it formed 14 years ago. She learned to play from her father. "I started when I was 7 or 8, as soon as I began to know the value of the cards," she said. "We would all play with my father. Instead of money, we used matches."

Poker was part of an active, home-based social life, she said. "We played cards and had dances. We didn't go to nightclubs. You did your dancing at home with your friends."

Although pleased that she can still play cards and do puzzles, nothing replaces golf, she said. "I regret that I can't play golf anymore. I was a fair golfer. I did very well at my club in Fairmont."

Stakes at the Saturday night poker game won't break the bank. "If you win $2 an evening, you've made a lot of money," said Helen Tallman, one of the charter members. "I do well because I keep the money for each evening."

Her father taught her poker as part of her social education, she said. "He had a wonderful attitude. His idea was, if you aren't going to be a raving beauty, you have to learn to do some of everything."

Time probably has colored the story behind the group's inception, but the women agree it makes a good tale. 

Tallman tells it like this: "In the early days up here, the men had a poker game on Saturday nights. The women felt sorry for them because there were only four players. One woman asked to play and she won all their money. They didn't like it and said they didn't want women anymore. So the ladies decided to have a poker club of their own just to spite them."

"It started with about six of us when I first moved up here," said 94-year-old Imy Albright. "We all played bridge and decided we wanted to play poker. When I was married, the husbands and wives all played poker."

The women gathered around the table represent backgrounds as diverse as the card combinations splayed in their hands. Albright was fashion buyer at The Diamond, Stone & Thomas and Peck's. A Columbus, Ohio, native, she moved to Charleston at age 22 when she married a chemical engineer at Carbide.

Dattilo taught home economics at Shinnston High School until she married a Harrison County wholesaler.

During World War II, she used her home economics knowledge to teach people about purifying polluted water following an attack, how to fix meals with powdered milk and a shortage of butter and sugar. "A department store let us have a window so people could see things they could use to plan meals," she said, "and we had a service organization where people could come in and learn how to work out things and do with less."

Approaching 91 in March, Tallman moved to Charleston from Philadelphia in 1946 when her husband accepted a job at DuPont. She was active in the Junior League and at Tennis Inc. She was a girls' tennis coach at Andrew Jackson Junior High and coached boys' tennis at John Adams for 10 years.

Van Cleve moved to Edgewood Summit in 1999 after teaching school, rearing four children and establishing herself as a national certified bridge teacher. "If you play bridge, it's natural to go to poker," she said.

 But she had a few things to learn. "As soon as one of the club members moved and they had a vacancy, Imy asked me to join them," she said. "I didn't know a thing about poker. I went to a gentleman friend, Bob McEldowney, and asked him to write out the order of hands, a full house and all that. He took me to a poker game two or three times.

"I'm much better than I was. When we get someone new, they go through the same process I went through. You have to know the order of hands."

"I'm a novice," said Ruth Barton, subbing for ailing regular Virginia Marr. "They gave me a printout of the hands so I'd have something to go by."

 Failing health and the grim reaper trim the roster from time to time, so members welcome interested newcomers with considerable enthusiasm.

Two rookie members, Betty Kenna and Virginia Point, are feeling their way. Kenna used to play poker with her husband and remembers the basics. Point is a greenhorn. "But she's the quickest learner we've ever seen," Tallman said.

"I learn something every week," Point said. "Usually painfully."

The group meets in the card room every Saturday immediately after dinner, Albright said. Unless there's a concert. "If there's a concert, we don't play."

There's something about poker that transcends the years, she said. "When you're young, you do a lot of things you wouldn't do now. But this continues on. Everybody likes to play poker."

Reach Sandy Wells at san...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5173.