Mabel Hagen will be 100 at the end of the month. She walks with a cane but nobody messes with her when they learn that she chased a bandit for two blocks at age 93.

The bandit, 50, ended up serving two years in prison.

About 100 members of a club called the Golden Circle gave a lunch in Mabel's honor last weekend, so I went to check up on her. She's still feisty as ever, talks a mile a minute and will bend your ear for as long as you listen.

The bandit episode started with Mabel sitting in her car in the Foodland parking lot on Beretania Street when a scruffy fellow with a beard and untidy hair leaned into the window and said, "Can you give me a dollar?"

"Mind your own business," Mabel answered.

He reached in and grabbed her purse. Mabel lit out after him, screaming, "He's got my purse, he's got my purse!" Somebody called 911. A police officer nabbed the panting suspect.

"His stomach was so big, I thought he had my purse under his shirt," she said. "So I poked his belly. He said, 'Take your hands off me.' "

There was no purse in sight. In the nick of time, a security guard for the supermarket found Mabel's purse in a hedge where the bandit had thrown it.

The police told her he had gotten out of jail a couple of days before. Mabel went to court to identify the thief.

"They had shaved off his beard, given him a haircut and dressed him in a neat suit," Mabel recalled. But not knowing that at the time, and with her eyesight getting a little fuzzy, she looked for long hair and a beard in the courtroom. "That's him," she declared, pointing to what turned out to be the fashionably long-haired bailiff. The judge told her she could go. Fortunately, the police officers recognized the thief.

Mabel is an old hand at athletic adventures. As a young girl on Kaua'i, she loved the water. She moved to Honolulu and joined the Outrigger Canoe Club at age 16. Duke Kahanamoku taught her the fine points of surfing.

She took up dancing at the University of Hawai'i and became a tap dance instructor in Waikiki. During World War II, Adm. Chester Nimitz admired her twinkling feet when she performed for the military.

Bob Hope came to town with his USO show and told Nimitz that he needed a tap dancer. Nimitz recommended Mabel. Hope told her on the phone, "This is Bob Hope." She said, "Yeah, and I'm Mary Pickford."

Mabel traveled to faraway places with Hope. She said he had trouble remembering his lines and was always forgetting dance routines. "Bob Hope told me that he and Bing Crosby just made up their own steps in those 'Road' movies," she said.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.