"Polly" Gifford drove until one month before turning 94.

On her 90th birthday, Nancy "Polly" Kellogg Urner Gifford's children arranged a surprise party for her. Her friend Audrey Morrison arranged for her to fly to the party in a helicopter.

Newspaper and television coverage kicked in as the pilot dipped to check out a group of people on the ground. As she was waving to them, Mrs. Gifford began recognizing her children.

She went skydiving on her 93rd birthday. "She wore this silver-looking skydiving suit," Morrison said. "Someone asked, 'Polly, where are your tennis shoes?' She said, 'I've never worn a pair.' She went up in Ferragamo shoes duct-taped to her feet!"

She drove until one month before her 94th birthday, when she began to suffer small strokes. She had lived alone in a town house until two years ago.

Mrs. Gifford, an independent soul all her life, died Thursday at Morrison's home in Poquoson, where she had lived since moving out of the town home. She was 96.

A funeral was held yesterday at Peninsula Funeral Home in Newport News, where she had moved in the 1960s with her second husband. Burial was in Peninsula Memorial Park in Newport News.

Mrs. Gifford should have been born at home, as most babies were then, in Elizabeth, N.J. The doctor, however, sent her mother to a New York hospital, anticipating a big baby.

Lacking a nursery, the nurses put her in a dresser drawer and dubbed their red-haired charge "Polly," Morrison said.

Mrs. Gifford graduated from a Virginia finishing school.

When she was 20, she married Stephen K. Urner, who became a poultry executive in the New York-New Jersey area. At about 50, he died of a heart attack in the backyard while she was fixing his lunch.

She next married Nathaniel H. Gifford Jr., a widower with three small sons whom she raised. They took his boys, whom she considered her own, to Disney World for their honeymoon.

They moved from Rhode Island to Newport News in 1966 on a job transfer. She nursed her husband through cancer until he died in 1984.

Survivors include two sons, Stephen Urner of Mercer Island, Wash., and James Urner of Bay Head, N.J.; three stepsons, Nathaniel Gifford of Trumbull, Conn., Sherman Gifford of Richmond and Gordon Gifford of Sudbury, Mass.; and nine grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.