Katherine "Kitty" Dunlap celebrated her centennial birthday recently at a festive, standing-room only party with friends, admirers and relatives. Hosted by Tommy and Gayle Delashmutt at Oak Hill, the elegant drawing rooms were populated with elegant, fascinating, debonnaire individuals of many eras.

Garden Club alumni, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and relatives from across the country were welcomed by Kitty into a beautiful Aegean Blue room fragrant with Casablanca lilies and country roses. Wearing a leopard print silk blouse and black silk slacks, she smiled often as guests delivered their best wishes and admiration.

A delightful look at Kitty's remarkable and very well-lived life follows in an article Eugene Scheel wrote for The Washington Post.

Anyone familiar with Weaver's breadth of activities through the years might suspect that her autobiography will hinge on a credo of her late husband, Henry Byrne "Hank" Weaver: "Change interests every 10 years, and that way you'll never be bored."

Kitty Weaver had the means to do that, for Hank Weaver, who died in 1995, was a prominent corporate lawyer, remembered in Northern Virginia for his and a number of others' efforts to save the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad by offering to buy it. They were unsuccessful, and the last freight cars left the tracks in 1968.

In fall 1947, the Weavers moved from suburban Falls Church to Glengyle, a farm of 110 acres near Lenah, a village on the old Little River Turnpike in Loudoun County. Chickens occupied one section of the 1790 stone and brick house that is still Weaver's home.

"They wanted to get away from it all," William Gray Dunlap, her nephew and a retired lawyer, told me recently. He and his wife, Patsy, have lived with Weaver since 2006.

Dunlap's father died when he was young, and Weaver thought it proper to have him and his brother live with the Weavers at Glengyle. (The parents had been separated.) Gray and Patsy, in turn, thought it proper to return the favor to Aunt Kitty, as she was 95 and living alone.

At the time, Weaver had just given up her apartment in the District, where she had studied Russian cinema with Peter Rollberg at George Washington University. Of the 15 colleges and universities she has attended, GWU is her favorite, perhaps because in 1933 she took her master of arts in English exam the same June day she was married to Hank Weaver.

She had received her first degree, a bachelor of arts in English from the College of William & Mary, and credits her father, Arch Robertson Dunlap, for her linguistic and writing abilities. Dunlap wrote "The Rambler" column for Florida's St. Petersburg Independent newspaper for 45 years.

Kitty's third degree, a 1947 bachelor of science in agriculture from the University of Maryland, came in handy when she decided not to get rid of the chickens at Glengyle that year. Rather, she moved them outdoors into proper quarters, and began raising 5,000 white leghorns -- "the best layers," she said when we spoke recently. "Hank took them to Washington in the back of his Rolls-Royce to sell to distributors." Kitty Weaver wasn't making much of a profit, and a fellow raiser of poultry advised her that to do so, she would need to keep 20,000 leghorns. That ended eight years as a chicken farmer.

The agriculture degree later became useful when she studied primates, especially gibbons, in the wilds of southern China and Borneo. She is a member of the International Primate Protection League, and she attended its last conference, in Summerville, S.C., last year.

In 1960, Kitty decided to take a course in Russian at the Hill School, near Middleburg. "Everybody had dropped out of the course, including the teacher," she told me, but the Cyrillic alphabet and linguistic difficulties whetted her appetite. She soon became proficient in the language through courses at Georgetown University and by subscribing to Pravda (the Truth), the official Soviet newspaper.

In 1963, following a Federal Bar Association meeting in West Berlin, the Weavers flew to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). They packed tennis rackets and asked their guide where they could play. Hank was led to fine hard courts at a sports complex, but Kitty was not as adept. She was sent to practice on the backboard with the children -- her initial contact with youngsters who would be subjects of her first two books.

A friend of the Weavers, Forrest Mars, the candy-manufacturing magnate from upper Fauquier County, "wanted to go with me," she said, "but I thought that he, being a capitalist, would ruin my trip."

Mars persisted, and the next year joined the Weavers, much to the delight of Soviet bureaucrats, who, having tasted the M&M's he always had in his pockets, "promised to give him a stud farm if he helped them build a candy factory. They thought his name was Marx," Kitty recalled. The plans went for naught.

Forty-eight more visits to the U.S.S.R., and then post-Soviet Russia, followed. "Each time after I returned, a man from the CIA would come [to Glengyle] and politely say, 'I'd like to talk to you about your trip.' " So they talked.

Interludes with the CIA didn't seem to bother the Russians. Kitty and Hank entertained them many times at Glengyle, often with the CIA in attendance. "She had a friend who was a spy for the U.S. and a Russian expatriate," Patsy Dunlap said. "Kitty would sit him next to the CIA agent. She has a wicked sense of humor." To return the hospitality, "we were invited to the Soviet Embassy quite a bit," Kitty added.

When questioned by friends as to her loyalty, Kitty remembered replying, "I'm not a Communist but a friend of the Soviet Union." She added wryly, "They always wanted to go to my parties."

In the late 1960s, Kitty was pursuing a PhD in Russian studies at Georgetown when a literary agent took a look at her dissertation and remarked, "Forget the thesis and write a book."

Simon & Schuster published "Lenin's Grandchildren: Preschool Education in the Soviet Union" in 1971. Written in a straightforward style, often in the form of a detailed diary, the book explored how the Soviet system educated its 2- to 7-year-olds. No one before had tackled the subject in such detail. The title was from a ditty children sang in kindergarten: "We are Lenin's grandchildren" -- words repeated in three of the song's six lines.

Kitty's next book, "Russia's Future: The Communist Education of Soviet Youth" (1981), dealt with preteen and teenage years. As with "Lenin's Grandchildren," Hank Weaver snapped all the photos with his Nikon.

In 1983, the Weavers decided to spend a semester at Moscow University. While she attended class and studied Russian culture, Hank, she remembered, "stood in line with the other housewives to get food. He didn't like meat especially, so he would barter his meat for vegetables and eggs."

Her last book on Russia, "Bushels of Rubles: Soviet Youth in Transition," followed in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It described the country's experiment with capitalism. Kitty's conclusion: "I don't think they understand capitalism at all." She describes herself as "a conscientious capitalist."

After her last trip to Russia in 2004, the next year she again traveled to China and, at age 95, insisted on climbing the Great Wall. As many of its thousands of steps are 15 inches high or more, the authorities made her sign a waiver, disclaiming any responsibility for injury or ill health. She reached the top.

Gene Scheel concludes with: As I searched for an ending to this column, the first words of "Lenin's Grandchildren" came to me: "If your child lives to be a hundred . . . "

Eugene Scheel is a historian and mapmaker who lives in Waterford. This story first appeared in The Washington Post, Sunday, October 4, 2009