With a smile that lights up the air around her, Grace Mason O'Neill takes up her sewing every Thursday morning at the American Cancer Society's Discovery Shop on California Avenue.

She is called "Amazing Grace" not only because of her magical smile or the bright brown eyes that concentrate so intently on her mending, nor is it her nimble fingers that guide fine steel instruments so surely along their restorative path. A good part of the reason is that this West Seattle native and holder of the 1927 crown of Miss West Seattle, will be celebrating, as well, a healthy and happy 97th birthday on Friday, August 26.

A graduate of Holy Rosary Grade School and St. James Cathedral, Grace waitressed through her high school years at Benson's Junction Restaurant on Alaska Street, where the RockSport now feeds and entertains revelers. Her father, John Mason, ran a paint and wallpaper shop just a few doors south of the present location of the Discovery Shop. Though she never learned who entered her name in the Miss West Seattle contest, it was probably done as a result of her interaction with diners at Benson's.

Grace remembers those days fondly. Se was crowned by Seattle's first woman mayor, Bertha Knight Landes, in Lincoln Park; riding on "The Dinky," a streetcar that shuttled West Seattleites from the Junction to the Fauntleroy Ferry Dock. She recalls, too, when horses would thunder to an emergency out of the police and fire station at the Alaska Junction, and when her grandmother would treat her to after-school movies at a theater where Petco now stands.

Years later, Grace was invited to interview for a job at Frederick & Nelson's department store. She was hired, then tutored, in 1928, in the new mending department in repairing runs in silk stockings -- a skill much in demand during the Great Depression and World War II .

"Mending a silk stocking is an art," Grace said recently, fingering a needle and examining the hem of the skirt she was re-stitching. "We learned to use fine tools and the idea was to join the silk threads around the run in such a way as to join them across the gap (run) and tie them, leaving barely any evidence of a weave. I loved the work."

She raised four children, Jack Daniels, Mary Ducharme, Kathleen Brunson and Tom O'Neill, and was promoted to manage the mending department at Frederick & Nelson's. In 1973, she retired.

When the Discovery Shop began serving the community on California Avenue in 1990, she promptly took up her mending services as a volunteer. She has been quietly weaving garments, sewing, stitching, darning, patching and generally "making things whole," every week at the shop ever since - as reliably as Thursday itself and radiating her generous smile.

In a productive life that spanned the 20th century (in which her father, brother and son all went to war) and contributes to the 21st, West Seattle's Mrs. O'Neill continues to be an Amazing Grace, indeed.