Supercentenarian Still Sharp as a Tack

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jun/25/local/me-aged25

Hitting the Big Eleven-O

By Andrew H. Malcolm
June 25, 2005 in print edition A-1

Marion Higgins is very good at remembering. She remembers writing her first book 10 years ago. She remembers moving into Seal Beach’s Leisure World in 1989. She remembers the history of furniture acquired at long-ago garage sales and celebrating the end of the World War – both II and I. She remembers hearing the Titanic had just sunk, and the long railroad ride to her family’s homestead in a new state called Idaho. And she remembers hating sunbonnets.

That would have been in the ’90s – the 1890s.

Mrs. Higgins turns 112 on Sunday. She is the oldest living Californian and is believed to be the 21st oldest living human. She belongs to an exclusive but growing population of super-old folks whose longevity is so much more than a family bragging rite.

Her life has spanned the terms of 20 of the 43 presidents in U.S. history. Her frail body, sharp-as-a-tack mind and amazing longevity are being closely studied by a little-known Los Angeles research center to discover secrets to living long and well.

According to the Gerontology Research Group at UCLA, the average life expectancy for Americans born today is 77.6 years (80.1 for women and 74.8 for men). The 2000 census found some 50,000 Americans who claimed to have reached 100.

The research group, accepted as a global authority on the super-elderly by Guinness World Records, among others, doesn’t care about those who’ve merely crossed the 100-year mark. These scientists become interested after someone reaches 110 – a super-centenarian – which only about 500 Americans of those 50,000 will.

Then, the group’s network of clever gerontology detectives like Robert Young seeks proof and insights.

“The entire globe has been explored and mapped,” Young says. “Now, we can start discovering the geography of the human life span.”

Young and others mine troves of data to verify the truly old, research their lives and uncover senior frauds. Earlier in life, it seems, adults tend to fib about their age on the low side; the age 39 keeps coming to mind. But somewhere in their late-80s/early-90s, people start padding ages on the high side, encouraged by proud family members and even the odd tourism agency.

In the eyes of these researchers, Marion Higgins is among the verified elite. She’s a living textbook on aging whose lifestyle, habits, health, mental acuity and genes – along with, ultimately, her autopsied body – may offer valuable clues in the age-old search for the secrets of longevity.

“We know so much more than before,” says Dr. L. Stephen Coles, a physician and co-founder of the Gerontology Research Group. “We see some patterns. For instance, your parents’ genes are primary. You don’t ever want to be fat. And optimists seem to fare particularly well. But we’re still only beginning to decipher the biological hieroglyphics of the human genome and how the human body ages.”

To Mrs. Higgins, who’s had 40,907 days to figure it out since June 26, 1893, that’s so much high-falutin’ folderol.

“I face every day one at a time and I’m always learning something new,” she says. “I’m just a slow learner.”

Also, she doesn’t eat raspberries. Not even for birthday celebrations. Mrs. Higgins’ second son, Horace, will preside over the family festivities. He’s 82, played tennis three times a week until last winter and may be the only Caltech graduate to attend a 60th class reunion – and bring his mother.

Super-centenarians remain rare, but their numbers are growing. In 1999, the gerontology group, a loose band of doctors, demographers and part-time researchers, counted 45 people verified as 110 or older. Today, its website (www.grg.org) lists 66. Over the years, it’s documented 835 super-centenarians, including 16 who reached 115.

Young, the group’s senior investigator, says few people have the ambition to reach 110. But, he notes, “At 109, given the alternative, 110 can seem acceptable.”

He estimates the world’s population of super-centenarians at 250 and growing, in part because doctors, medicines and nutrition have prolonged what experts call the human health span – the period between birth and the cascade of medical problems that mark the end of life.

Verification by the research group is a rigorous, peer-reviewed procedure involving original documents such as birth and marriage certificates. Modern reissues of documents or family Bible notations are insufficient.

Young and group colleagues such as Louis Epstein often pore over old census data and military draft records. Many of the 1890 census records were destroyed by fire, but the 1900 census is a treasure chest, listing birth month and year for each resident at most U.S. addresses.

Epstein, the 44-year-old owner of an Internet service provider in Putnam County, N.Y., and Young, a 31-year-old graduate student in Atlanta, share an academic delight in digging up accurate documents, uncovering frauds and challenging each other.

Investing a few hours each day, they work with a network of like-minded researchers around the world who monitor the continued existence of listed super-centenarians and help gather documentation on new ones from slow-moving officials, gullible news media and nonchalant families who do not share the researchers’ diligence, discipline or sense of urgency.

For instance, Young has been waiting months for a marriage certificate from the family of Mary MacIsaac in Saskatchewan that would add her to the list at 111. “You must think and question like a detective,” he says.

Epstein and Young keep a list of false and exaggerated old-age cases. Charlie Smith of Liberia claimed to be 137 but was really only 105. Susie Brunson of South Carolina said she was 123, 18 years older than documents showed. They even uncovered an apparent conspiracy of travel agents on a Caribbean island who touted phony native super-centenarians to promote tourism.

“When claiming to be young becomes futile,” Young notes, “claiming to be older can seem desirable.”

Age 115 is now regarded as a realistic upper limit to human longevity, which five women could reach by November. The oldest documented human was Jean Calment of France, who died Aug. 4, 1997, at 122 years and 164 days. The oldest validated super-centenarian today is Hendrikje Van Andel of the Netherlands, who will turn 115 next week. The oldest American is Elizabeth Bolden of Tennessee, who will turn 115 on Aug. 15.

Why bother with all this?

“First of all,” says Epstein, “facts are important in life. And so is debunking frauds.”

Young, who grew up fascinated by World War I tales told by an aged aunt, thinks there’s much to learn about history from, say, an ancient war veteran or the child of a slave. He travels to birthday parties for listed super-centenarians, where he’s treated like family.

“I want to educate people on what it takes to live a very long time,” he says. “It’s not easy and it’s not a circus sideshow.”

For Coles, keeping legitimate lists offers important scientific benefits: opportunities to continue decoding human DNA and the mysterious aging process through long-lived examples.

“People think if we can only eliminate disease after disease, we can live forever,” he says. “Not! Our bodies are biological machines with certain warranty periods built in through the DNA of our fathers and mothers. So pick your parents wisely.”

Indeed, the group’s research shows genetics can trump lifestyle. Mrs. Higgins’ siblings lived into their 80s, her mother to 92, and her father to 101. Young’s old notes show that men with sisters living to 100 are 17 times more likely than others to make it that far themselves. Other indicators are less clear.

In the longevity race it’s best to be female; 90% of super-centenarians are women. Coles also sees moderate living as critical. Or as Mrs. Higgins puts it, “I never had enough money to lead a riotous life.”

During World War II, when two sons served in the Navy and a third was a USO entertainer in Les Brown’s Band of Renown, Mrs. Higgins lived in Pomona and made tail de-icers for B-17 bombers. Her husband, John, a machinist, died in 1949 at 60. After a career with the Los Angeles County tax assessor, Mrs. Higgins has drawn Social Security since the first Eisenhower administration.

Being active and involved with others also seems to lengthen longevity. Mrs. Higgins set some records in the Senior Olympics in her day, which, she admits, reflects the absence of competitors in her 85-to-90 age bracket 25 years ago.

Her social schedule is built around visitors and visiting, as well as audiobooks (mysteries are a favorite), religious radio programs and garage sales, which she and son Horace visit weekly before they do crossword puzzles together.

He and his wife, Liz, also take dictation of a continuous stream of super-centenarian stories. Many were collected in a book privately published by Mrs. Higgins. She’s sold 900 copies so far at prices that vary according to her estimation of a customer’s willingness to pay.

“In the fifth grade,” Mrs. Higgins recalls, “I got a tablet and sat down to write a book. I was very excited. But I couldn’t write anything because I hadn’t lived much yet. So I waited ‘til I was 102. Writing makes me feel so alive.”

Although no one remains from her early years to contradict details, Mrs. Higgins’ memory seems sharp and clear. She recalls the word games her father invented while the farm family sorted beans around the dining room table. She can still rattle off the alphabet – backward.

Mrs. Higgins’ eyesight and hearing have clouded in recent years, but her senses of taste and smell still function. At 96, she had a hip replaced, and she broke her thigh a few years ago after a stumble. “I gave away those shoes,” she says.

That injury caused her Assembly of God minister, Howard Fox, to install a bicycle horn on Mrs. Higgins’ cane. She has also had some facial skin cancers removed, the delayed price for often shucking that sunbonnet behind her mother’s back a century ago.

Moderation in diet also enhances longevity. Coles cites studies of lab animals fed less and living longer than relatives on more bounteous fare. More bluntly, Young adds, “We don’t find any fat 110-year-olds.”

Mrs. Higgins, who awakens about 8 a.m. daily, weighs 134 pounds, up a little since her activity declined in recent years. For breakfast, she has oatmeal and fruit. For lunch, a sandwich, soup and more fruit. And for dinner, her housekeeper knows that chicken or pork chops, broccoli and apple sauce or Mrs. Higgins’ beloved peaches are always welcome.

“I don’t really dislike anything,” Mrs. Higgins says, “although I’m allergic to raspberries.” Chewier foods also tax her worn dentures.

Her birthday this weekend will not be celebrated with any of those little firecrackers that Mrs. Higgins liked to throw around in packs during countless summer evenings. Nor will there be cake. Instead, she’ll get a blueberry pie and vanilla ice cream. Visitors who want candy know to keep boxes of chocolates beyond her reach.

They also know that at the slightest urging, Mrs. Higgins will accurately recite entire epic poems from her childhood, detailed verse after detailed verse, her weathered fingers still fidgeting with her skirt as they might have in front of that ninth-grade English class 98 years ago.

A visiting Coles marvels aloud at the recitation and the sharp memory of California’s oldest person, taking note of it all for his super-centenarian files.

Mrs. Higgins quietly chuckles, but then cautions him. “I’m afraid,” she admits, “I don’t remember the teacher’s name.”

Four Centenarians Share Their Secrets

http://www.finecraftsimports.com/products/copper_vase.asp?pid=50203-9

Published: September 18, 2008 01:24 am

CITY OF LOCKPORT: Four centenarians honored at Dale Association
By Bill Wolcott
E-mail Bill
Lockport Union-Sun & Journal

One of these things doesn’t belong here: Work hard, don’t worry, reflexology, cake and ice cream.

Actually, they were all cited as reasons for longevity at A Centenarian Birthday Celebration at the Dale Association on Wednesday.

• Helen Whitwell, 102; Loraine Clark, 100; Leetah Brown, 104; and Ada Baes, 101, were honored by the Niagara County Office for the Aging and the Niagara County Bicentennial committee. There are 27 people in the county who are 100 years old and some could not attend the centenarian parties.

The Dale Association dining room was filled with family, well-wishers and seniors who come regularly for lunch. There was cake and ice cream for dessert.

• Leetah Brown, who was born in Pennsylvania, was married twice and had no children. During World War II, she worked in an ammunition factory.

“I hauled 4,000 pound of bombs behind me to the shipping room,” she said. “That made me so I don’t fear everything.”

Her secret for longevity: “The Lord made me that way. I haven’t done anything special to keep me older,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of sickness in my life, but I recovered. I’m just tough.”

Brown has been practicing and teaching reflexology since 1980. Great niece Debby Dearborn said: “She’s very involved with holistic medicine. That has a lot to do with why she’s lived so long.”

• Ada Baes and Helen Whitwell helped get the Dale Association going. Baes volunteered at the front desk. Helen and Al Whitwell built the snack bar, using wood from a barn.

Baes, a Lockport native, came to the Dale Association after retiring from teaching in Akron for 22 years. She has two sons and enjoys listening to music.

• Helen Whitwell, taught school 35 years in Lockport and Gasport. In 1930, she started a public/private school for families who were not happy with the Lockport schools. She and her husband helped build the Dale Association.

His grandparents had a tavern on Ridge Road that was visited by the Marquis de Lafayette, who ate in the kitchen with the family.

Her secret? “She drinks goat milk every day,” said her daughter, Doris Whitwell. “She has for years and years.”

• Loraine Clark’s mother died during childbirth when she was 2. Her father remarried and the family grew to 10 children.

Loraine and Lewis Clark operated Clark’s Charcoal Grill for 23 years. The summer place served grilled foods, but was famous for its homemade pies. “Only eat things that I like,” Loraine said. “I never eat anything I don’t like.”

Hard work has carried her for a century. “We would sell 100-125 pies and make them the same day,” Loraine said. “It was famous. People came from Rochester.”

Loraine and Lewis had four children, and 14 members of the family attended the lunch. One son who lives in Arizona was not in attendance, but did come to her 100th birthday celebration in May.

“She doesn’t worry too much. She lets every day take care of itself,” said son Donald Clark who lives in East Aurora. “She’s our inspiration.”

“Attitude is a big thing with her,” daughter Rita McGuinnes. “She’s not a worrier. She very seldom gets stressed out about anything.”

“She’s a hard worker, no doubt about it,” daughter Lois Steblein said.

Each women received a bicentennial bear and pins and flowers. Mayor Michael Tucker and Sen. George Maziarz, R. Newfane, attended.

108 Year Old Woman Doesn't See What The Big Deal Is

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-centenarion-15-sep15,0,1959317.story


At 108, Evanston woman has personal and scientific knowledge about aging
She likes to watch golf, nap and walk—but scientists are interested in her genes

By Deborah Horan | Chicago Tribune reporter
September 15, 2008




Evelyn Ralston, 108, lives in Evanston and has a birthday on Oct. 17. If she celebrates just two more birthdays, she'll be a supercentenarian, a person who has made it to 110, an age only 1 in nearly 6 million ever reaches. (Tribune photo by Jose M. Osorio / August 11, 2008)

Scientists would love to study Evelyn Ralston, pepper her with questions about her lifestyle, take samples of her DNA.

Not that their grand endeavors particularly concern the Evanston centenarian. Ralston would rather watch golf on television, nap in the afternoon and take daily walks outside her retirement home, a plush assisted living facility called Mather Place at The Georgian.

"I'm not that interesting," said Ralston, alert and immaculately dressed on a recent afternoon.

At 108 years old, Ralston is not only interesting to gerontologists, she belongs to a selective group of people who have lived more than a century. If she celebrates just two more birthdays, she'll enter an even more exclusive cohort of supercentenarians, people who have made it to 110, an age only 1 in nearly 6 million ever reaches.


Ralston will turn 109 Oct. 17. Her thin frame and unruffled manner likely helped her live this long; scientists say people who live longer tend to be slim and less stressed about life's ups and downs. But those traits are secondary to the attribute that matters: good genes.

"In order to make it past 100, you had to win the genetic lottery at birth," said Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Gerontologists are discovering that the secret to longevity lies not in a magical Fountain of Youth, but remains hidden—for now—along the intricate genetic sequencing in a person's DNA. The challenge is to map the genomes of the really old to find which gene mutations they have in common.

"Something helps them get to old age," said Nir Barzilai, a professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who has been studying centenarians since 1998. "We're trying to identify the genetic elements that help protect them."

So far, he has discovered four genes that he says appear important to longevity: two are related to good cholesterol; one exists in fat—and the less fat the better; the fourth gene delays growth.

The study of the very old has made other gains in recent years, gerontologists said.

Part of the reason is that there are more centenarians than ever before due to medical breakthroughs that reduced child mortality rates, deaths from infectious diseases, and the number of women dying during childbirth. Luck plays a factor too.

"You have to avoid getting run over by a bus," Olshansky said. "Then you have the opportunity to express the longevity potential you were born with."

Thomas Perls, director of the New England Supercentenarian Study and a geriatrician at Boston Medical Center, has found people older than 100 tend to be a diverse group—they may have had heart attacks or smoked or were overweight for part of their lives, and yet something compelled them to live a century.

But after 110, that heterogeneity ceases, he said. He has mapped the DNA of some 80 people over 110 and found they were more genetically homogenous. He hopes that similarity will make it easier to isolate the variations that helped them live so long.

"With [homogeneity] comes a much better chance of discovering some of these genetic variations," Perls said.

In about a year, Ralston would be eligible to participate in Perls' study. Ralston has a baptismal certificate and a passport to prove her age—but verifying even that fact has proved difficult for scientists studying extreme age.

Few places at the turn of the 19th century issued birth certificates. Births, if they were noted at all, were registered in church logs. Many people, gerontologists said, exaggerate their age or don't really know it. The lack of documentation makes keeping statistics difficult.

Data from the Illinois Department of Public Health, for instance, showed a little more than 2,000 people were ages 100 to 104 in 2000, the most recent statistic available. The stats logged 59 as more than 110 years old. Gerontologists said those numbers are likely bloated.

Regardless, Ralston plans a quiet celebration with little fanfare.

If prompted, she'll recount her family's first car, bought in 1926, and the time she drove it off the family farm to help her brothers steer cattle to market.

She remembers her first trip to Europe after she got her passport at age 72.

Besides, as birthdays go, she doesn't see what is the big deal.

"I'm not that old," she said. "A lot of people are older than me."

dhoran@tribune.com

Independent Centenarian Still Makes Herself Small Meals

My source: www.miamiherald.com/living/food/story/622558.html+utha+deen&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Giving seniors an appetite for life -- and food
Posted on Thu, Jul. 31, 2008

BY MARY MEEHAN
McClatchy News Service

It might just be some vegetable soup, a grilled pimento cheese sandwich and a glass of milk, but 102-year-old Utha B. Deen makes a point to make herself a nice little lunch and supper every day.

Still, her daughter, Betty, frets.

''She's always fussing at me for not eating enough,'' said Deen.

There is a bowl of fresh peaches and bananas in her cozy kitchen, and Deen is likely to cook up a roast and parcel it out in other dishes throughout the week.

Still, like lots of seniors who live on their own, Deen has to be vigilant to make sure she gets proper nutrition. Some of the challenge is cooking for one. Some of it is in response to how the human body changes as we age.

''The metabolic rate slows down,'' said Maria G. Boosalis, director of the division of clinical nutrition at the University of Kentucky College of Health Services. ``The amount of calories we need does go down. Our taste buds don't work as well; we don't smell as well.''

She said older people also tend to have a reduced appetite. Some medicines can change the sense of taste and make you feel less hungry, said Diana Doggett, a Fayette County, Ky., extension agent.

Another issue is dental health. If your teeth aren't healthy, chewing can be a problem and nutrition suffers.

So what can seniors do?

Dietary needs vary depending on age, sex and level of activity. Most seniors need 1,600 to 2,000 calories a day, Boosalis said. Ideally, that would include 1 ½ cups of fruit, 2 cups of vegetables, 5 ounces of grain, three servings of dairy and 5 teaspoons of fat. Getting adequate calcium and vitamin D also is important -- to keep bones strong -- as is a diet high in fiber to keep bowels moving regularly and lower the risk for chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes.

For seniors who might not make it to the grocery as easily or as often as they used to, eating properly can be tough. Although fresh is best, a good alternative can be frozen strawberries or blueberries, with no added sugar, and frozen vegetables. Make sure the pantry has staples including whole grains, peanut butter and shelf-stable milk.

And don't forget about water. As we age, we can experience a decline in the ability to sense thirst, Doggett said.


* * *

Her daughter would do well to quit worrying; not only is that not a trait that will get her mother's age, but it has long been established that reduced caloric intake is likely why her mother is still around and healthy in the first place. You'd think these people would understand that the centenarians are the ones who are doing stuff right!

Near-Centenarian Roberta McCain in Perfect Health

http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/080108/page2.html

It is a gorgeous spring day in Washington, and I am sitting in a suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel chatting with Roberta McCain while she is having her nails done for Vogue's photo shoot. So far she's been amenable to—and completely delighted with—everything we've suggested: the nails, a change of clothes, a light hair-and-makeup session. "If I leave here and my glass slippers fall off, I won't know what to do," she says, laughing. Next up is a pose in stocking feet on a narrow five-story balcony, which is making everyone but her slightly nervous. "Just call me Barkis," she says, referring to the character in David Copperfield. "I'm willing."

At 96, Roberta (as she insists everyone call her) is not just willing but almost startlingly able and a good example of the resilient genes that her son has been eager to showcase by taking her out on the campaign trail. The daughter of a successful wildcatter, the widow of a highly decorated naval admiral, and now the mother of the Republican nominee for the presidency, she spent her married life in posts ranging from London to Honolulu and has traveled—relentlessly—to pretty much every point in between. At 88, when she was told she was too old to rent a car in Europe, she simply bought one and drove it from Munich to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with her twin sister and most constant traveling companion, Rowena. ("I wanted to see Samarkand," she explains, and with that accomplished she continued on to Greece, India, and New Zealand, leaving the car behind in Europe for future jaunts.) Last Christmas she had lunch in Paris at Maxim's and spent New Year's Eve at the Lido before taking off for England and Scotland. A woman of no light convictions, she was rumored, during her son's 2000 presidential bid, to have flown the Taiwanese flag out the window of her apartment in Washington near the Chinese Embassy on the anniversary of the Communist Party's victory in the Chinese Civil War. While her son said, "I would truly not be surprised," his mother wasn't giving anything away. "I'm not saying whether I did or I didn't," she told a reporter. "The less said, the sooner mended. Have you heard that one?"

Despite such uncharacteristic hedging, The Washington Post, in a play on the bus that has become her son's campaign signature, dubbed her "The Even Straighter Talk Express," and it is an apt description. Thoroughly engaging, she is the proverbial open book, albeit a rollicking one that is equal parts history, travelogue, and Who's Who of the twentieth century. In the time it takes for two coats of pale-pink nail polish to dry, the conversation loops from: mutual friends we have in Mississippi (her father grew up there, and the McCain family roots in the state also go deep); the Mae West/W. C. Fields film My Little Chickadee ("the funniest movie I ever saw"); the fate of the shah of Iran ("The way we treated that man was disgraceful.… His problem was he never let anyone beneath him have enough power"); her friendship with J. Paul Getty ("I just loved him—he could tell you about everything"), and the party she has just attended at the Turkish embassy ("It was so glamorous you can't believe it"). She begins almost every sentence with "honey," and when the shoot is over, she tucks, with gusto, into a plate of cold lobster mayonnaise. At her departure, she assures us all that "this was the most fun I've ever had."

She may well have meant it—"I'm happiest wherever I am right this minute," she has told me—but there is no question that she has had a lot more fun than this.

Roberta Wright McCain was born on February 7, 1912, to Myrtle and Archie Wright, who had accumulated lots of land in Oklahoma and Texas just before the oil boom, and subsequently moved the family to Los Angeles. The two youngest of five children, she and Rowena were "always real athletic," she says. "We could run faster and jump higher, and at church suppers or what-have-you, we were always going to win the race. There was no conceit about it or anything; everybody just knew the twins could do it." Her father instilled the travel bug in his children early on, driving them through the Mojave Desert and taking them on trips to see the source of the Mississippi and to learn about the Great Lakes. With their mother the twins went by train to New York. "She always got her linen on sale at B. Altman's in January and June, and she bought our clothes at Best's."

When Roberta eloped at nineteen with Jack McCain, a young Navy ensign ("the lowest of the low," she says of his rank), she took her schoolbooks with her to Tijuana, where they married in a room above Caesar's bar. The event earned the groom a reprimand for going AWOL and merited a headline in the San Francisco Examiner: SOCIETY COED ELOPES WITH NAVAL OFFICER: ROBERTA WRIGHT DEFIES FAMILY. Rowena describes their mother as having a "cat fit" over the nuptials, and looking back, Roberta says she can understand why she "was out of sorts" with her daughter pretty much all the time. "I realize now I was so immature. I just took life as it came—still do."

The latter turned out to be good strategy for a naval wife who occasionally camped out in Quonset huts and moved her three children, Sandy, John III, and Joe, from port to port while her husband was away for long stretches. She insists she loved every place she settled, except maybe Panama, "but that was because it was so hot and there wasn't any air-conditioning." In his memoir, Faith of My Fathers, McCain writes that his mother was obliged to fill the roles of both parents, and that he "became my mother's son," adding that what he lacked of Roberta's "charm and grace," he made up for by "emulating and exaggerating her other characteristics. She was loquacious, and I was boisterous. Her exuberance became rowdiness in me.… She has an irrepressible spirit that yields to no adversity." A touching tribute to be sure, but Roberta will have none of it. "Obviously," she told a reporter when the book was released, "that means all the trouble he got into came from me."

As her husband ascended the ranks, life became a tad more glamorous. Madame Chiang Kai-shek (whom she describes as "misunderstood") gave her presents, and in Hawaii she became close friends with Clare Boothe Luce. While in London she would frequently spend country weekends at the estates of both Getty and Lord Mountbatten. "My eyes were just rolling around in my head like marbles, I was so impressed with the people we were meeting all the time," she tells me. "But they were famous because they'd amounted to something."

It was in London that she learned that "Johnny," as she invariably calls her son, had been shot down in Vietnam. First she waited days to find out if he was alive, and then she waited five and a half years for him to be released. When I ask if she was a nervous wreck through it all, she says, simply, "No. I believe in God's will, I really do. When I pray, I only ever ask for that; I don't ask for things like 'Please help Johnny get into Princeton.' " Besides, she says, "I had talked all that patriotic talk, so in times of fish or cut bait, do I stand up to the claims I've made or not?"

Not only was her husband a decorated admiral, her father-in-law was as well. "I would have been ashamed if my son had not served his country. The ones I feel sorry for are these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds out there now who lose a leg. But Johnny chose his profession; he was doing his job," she says, adding that I could go down in a plane crash doing mine. "This is life."

"When Johnny was in prison, that woman never made a peep," says Rowena of her twin. "Same thing after Jack died." Still, while Roberta may have been stoic, she never lost her sense of delight in the world. "We were invited everywhere, and I always wanted to go along," Roberta says. When her husband died in 1981, on a flight from Europe to Washington, where they had finally settled, she kept going, traveling with Rowena from the Jordanian desert to Tasmania for two or three months each year. Two years ago, when she could no longer get insurance on the car she had left in Europe, a Mercedes "baby Benz," she had it shipped back to the States and drove it across the country to her nephew in San Francisco—by way of Mississippi, Arkansas ("I couldn't find the Ozarks, or at least I didn't see all the beauty I'd read about"), Louisiana, and Arizona, where she was given a ticket for going 112 miles an hour. "The policeman said, 'Didn't you see me?' and I said, 'Yeah, I saw you,' " she tells me, laughing. "I went straight to the next town and got the money to send to the police. I thought the quicker it was over, the better, so nobody would find out."

"She knows everything that's in every museum in this world," says Rowena. Indeed, when she's not on the road, she avails herself of the offerings of her home city, going to the National Gallery or the Freer (she has a whole room full of the Chinese porcelain she loves, and the Freer has a stunning collection) every Tuesday morning for three hours (as long as she can legally park her car, a red BMW). On occasion, she says, she "hoists herself up to New York," taking the train (with a stop in Philadelphia to visit the Museum of Art there "until my feet fall off") and checking into the New York Yacht Club "because it's cheap." An avid reader, she is currently engrossed in The Odyssey of Chinese Imperial Art Treasures ("It's like a paper chase—it ought to be a movie") and, of course, the newspapers. "I think the treatment they've given Hillary is just awful. She's a human being, and she's certainly worked hard. I mean, anything you say, you can take two ways, even if it's about the weather."


She credits her longevity to good genes (her father remained active until he died of cancer at 98) as well as her California upbringing. Rowena concurs. "We played outside all the time and only ate fresh vegetables and fruits—crates of oranges from California and apples shipped in from Maryland. Our parents had some sense. They never let us drink Coca-Cola or coffee or anything like that, and the only cakes we ever saw were at other children's birthday parties." Both sisters rarely touch alcohol, though Rowena professes to love the occasional glass of champagne and reports seeing Roberta drink beer, but only in Europe.

"I don't do anything I'm supposed to do," Roberta tells me on the phone when I ask her how she manages to maintain her almost astonishing vitality. "I don't exercise, and today I've already eaten half a box of caramel popcorn." The regimen, or lack thereof, seems to be working. Her posture is straight as an arrow, her gait is brisk, and, though a doctor told her once she had arthritis in her hands, she says, "I guess I do, but I've never had an ounce of pain from it.

"Honey, I've had a dream life, and it was all luck," she says. I venture that the impetuosity and appetite her mother so often bemoaned might have had at least a bit to do with it. "I'm glad my mother's not around, because I still don't plan ahead or think things out." She laughs. "Mother told me once, 'If the gardener asked you to go to Chinatown with him, you'd go.' And I thought, Well, of course I would."

"The Firecracker" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the August 2008 issue of Vogue.

Interview with 105-Year-Old Mary Sims Elliott

http://www.ovpr.uga.edu/researchnews/95su/eliot_sb.html


Conversations with a Centenarian
by Judy Purdy

It's hard to imagine a lifetime that spans the invention of the automobile to the advent of the electronic superhighway. During her 105 years, though, Mary Sims Elliott has seen everything from the invention of hot dogs, fortune cookies and ice cream cones to the demise of the Boxer revolution, the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall.

What's it like to begin a journey in the Gay Nineties and now be heading toward the 21st century? What lifelong lessons would Mrs. Elliott, one of the first participants in the Georgia Centenarian Study, pass along to others?

In addressing the Georgia legislature, which honored her last February during Senior Citizens Week, she emphasized that "it's important to love all people of all sizes, shapes and colors. That's what really matters."

The following excerpts are taken from conversations with Mrs. Elliott that span the past year.

"In September 1894, 101 years ago this fall, I entered kindergarten at Kent Place School for Girls in Summit, N.J. It was the same year the school opened, and my father was one of its founders. Summit was a very safe place for any child to go anywhere in town. Mother taught us to stop at the corner and look both ways to see that no horses or carriages were coming.

"We used to play wonderful outdoor games: cops and robbers, hide and seek, yards off. I also spent lots of time with my dear grandfather, a wonderful, old man and a good companion for a tot. He had eyes like the sky and the purest heart. He was a Scotch-Presbyterian and taught me the favorite old hymns.

"Sprinkle wagons were frequently seen on the streets in summer. They had sprayers, and the wagons would go along the roads and lay down the dust. Then there was the iceman's wagon. You'd put a sign in your kitchen window [with] how many pounds of ice you wanted. He would come and with great big tongs put ice in our ice box. The honey vendor would walk through the streets calling, honey, honey, clover honey.' He would have on his head a round pan with a big oval basin full of honey. He would come to your kitchen, put his big pan on top of your washtub and dish out the honey.

"We were brought up for courtesy in all things -- for people who work for and with us. My father, who was vice president, secretary and treasurer of the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad, was known as the most courteous man in town. Courtesy is very valuable, and I taught my children to look people in the eye and be open and friendly.

"Music has always meant so much to me. My mother was an accomplished pianist. She used to play for the Ladies Fortnightly Club -- which became the Federated Women's Clubs in the new century. She would often play for the family in the evenings. We children would go up to bed and call downstairs for Mama to play so-and-so from Chopin.

"Mother taught me to play simple hymns till I was old enough to learn others. By 1898 or 99, I was playing by ear some of the first ragtime. In 1901, we went to our [summer] cottage in the Catskills for the first time. The little, white Baptist church there had an itinerant minister, and I said Mother, they haven't anybody to play the little bellows organ for services. Can I play for them?' and Mother said, Well certainly, dear.' So I started playing those jiggy little country hymns in the country church that year, and every year till I was 24 and got married.

"When I was 86, my old piano had worn out, so I bought another one. I was at the top of my performance. In 1979, though, I sold it because my dear daughter needed money to have her house painted, and that was the only way I could get it. But I can still harmonize mentally. (With this, she smiles and tilts her head back, closes her eye and fans out her fingers as if playing an imaginary piano.) My hands were very flexible. I used to be able to reach one over an octave, but now I can only span one octave. I played the organ for my grandson's wedding when I was 96, and at 97 I was a substitute organist at the Frederica Church on St. Simon's Island. I was too old to drive, but I had friends who took me.

"My sister Dorothy and I took a ship, the Koening Albrecht, to Europe for the summer in 1905 with a chaperon. I was 15 and Dorothy was 18, and we took the longest sea trip my father could find to rest Dorothy after her [graduation] exams."

[Editor's note: Mrs. Elliott still remembers her French. When Leonard Poon, who directs the UGA centenarian study, traveled to France to work with other centenarian researchers, he invited Mrs. Elliott to write a letter to Madame Jeanne Calment, who at 120 is the oldest documented person in the world. Without assistance, Mrs. Elliott composed her letter in French. When asked how she had remembered French after so many years, she replied, "My dear, I learned it very well as a child."]

"I believe in proper development in mind, body and soul. My parents read to us about Greek myths and Scandinavian legends. In today's society we need to teach mothers and children guiding principles to live by. We need to turn things around; there needs to be a return to the teachings of the Bible.

"Generation after generation of my family has worked on the affairs of the church. When I was 95, I got some friends about 20 years younger than I to help me organize a local chapter of the prayer book society at my church. When I can't work any more, God will know.

"I feel fine except that I don't hear very well and I don't see very well, and at this age it's rather hampering. I am so old I better be glad with what I have. When I get frustrated I pray it off and I laugh it off. If you can't laugh at things, you're in a sad state. I had a cataract operation four years ago and it was a slow recuperative period but afterwards I had a new lease on life because [I am] seeing colors again.

"As a child I learned little sayings that have stayed with me all my life: Good, better, best; never let it rest till your good is better and your better, best. Another is: Do your best in all you do and your best will come back to you. No matter how awful things get sometimes, there's a good side. I have a life filled with love because I have always tried to love others. It's been a wonderful saga, a wonderful life. Just marvelous."



* * *

I just so happen to live near where she grew up (Summit, NJ). If Summit back then was anything like it is now, she very likely came from a relatively wealthy family, so she may have benefited from higher living standards.

Personality Predictors of Longevity in Tokyo Centenarians

http://www.springerlink.com/content/a537x21j0j377756/

Do personality characteristics predict longevity? Findings from the Tokyo Centenarian Study

Journal AGE
Publisher Springer Netherlands
ISSN 0161-9152 (Print) 1574-4647 (Online)
Issue Volume 28, Number 4 / December, 2006
Category Research Article
DOI 10.1007/s11357-006-9024-6
Pages 353-361
Subject Collection Biomedical and Life Sciences
SpringerLink Date Thursday, November 30, 2006


Research Article
Do personality characteristics predict longevity? Findings from the Tokyo Centenarian Study

Y. Masui1, 3 Contact Information, Y. Gondo1, H. Inagaki1 and N. Hirose2
(1) Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Tokyo, Japan
(2) Department of Geriatric Medicine, Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan
(3) Present address: 35-2 Sakae-cho, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo 173-0015, Japan

Received: 6 June 2006 Revised: 6 October 2006 Accepted: 7 October 2006 Published online: 29 November 2006

Abstract To explore whether personality influences longevity we examined the personality characteristics of centenarians. We developed a new method that compares an actual personality test score for centenarians with a predicted test score for a 100-year-old, calculated from younger controls. The participants consisted of 70 cognitively intact Japanese centenarians aged 100–106 years and 1812 elderly people aged 60–84 years, all residents of Tokyo. The NEO five factor inventory (NEO-FFI) was used to assess the “big five” personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The results showed higher openness in both male and female centenarians, and higher conscientiousness and extraversion in female centenarians, as compared to controls. These results suggest that high scores in the specific personality traits conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness, are associated with longevity. We speculate that these personality traits contribute to longevity through health-related behavior, stress reduction, and adaptation to the challenging problems of the “oldest old”.

Key words centenarian - longevity factors - NEO-FFI - personality traits

Contact Information Y. Masui
Email: ymasui@tmig.or.jp

* * *

I thought the universal finding when it came to the big five was low neuroticism, a result that isn't seen here. There could be ethnic/cultural issues at play.

I guess there is still a lot of variation when it comes to long-lived people's personalities, but the key is to have less anxiety. So you may be conscientious, for example, but if it's motivated by anxiety about poor future outcomes rather than earnestness and optimism, it probably won't get you as far.

'How to Live to 100'

Copy of this 11-year old article found here:
http://www.bumc.bu.edu/Dept/Content.aspx?DepartmentID=361&PageID=5900

Newsweek
How to Live to 100
Decrepitude isn't inevitable. New research shows we all have the tools to live longer lives and die faster deaths.
June 30, 1997

By Geoffrey Cowley


At 104, Angeline Strandal doesn't place much stock in doctors. "If they start poking around you," she says, "they'll only make you sick." The Massachusetts centenarian does go in for a physical once in a while, but she hasn't been seriously ill since the time she came down with appendicitis--in 1925. "People ask me what I eat," she says. "I'm a vegetarian, more or less. I never smoked. I don't drink either. That's one of my good qualities. And I keep my bedroom window open 365 days a year." Strandal has outlived 11 siblings and a husband, who died back in 1931, but she still cooks every day except Sunday for her 67-year-old daughter and her 69-year-old son. She also catches a daily mass on TV, roots faithfully for the Boston Red Sox and loves nothing more than a good heavyweight fight. "Every day I ask God to give me one more day," she muses. "And believe it or not, he does."

We baby boomers may soon find ourselves emulating Angeline Strandal, or someone like her, as devoutly as we once did Jim Morrison. We've watched our parents or grandparents die in their 70s--often sick, lonely and helpless--and we're beginning to sense that life should be longer and richer than that. "When the boomers started turning 50, it was like the start of the Oklahoma land rush," says Dan Perry, director of the Washington-based Alliance for Aging Research. Surveys by Perry's organization suggest that today's 50-year-olds are suddenly serious about living to 100, and keen to get there in reasonably good health.

"They don't want to spend any time at all in a nursing home," he says. "The fear of losing independence and the ability to fend for oneself is overwhelming."

Well, it turns out we may have a say in the matter. A growing body of research suggests that chronic illness is not an inevitable consequence of aging, as we've long believed, but more often the result of lifestyle choices that we're perfectly free to reject. "People used to say, 'Who would want to be 100?' " says Dr. Thomas Perls, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and director of the New England Centenarian Study. "Now they're realizing it's an opportunity." So are booksellers and magazine publishers. "Live long, die fast," the dust jackets urge us. "Dare to be 100." Many of us will fall short of that number simply through bad genes or bad luck. And high-tech medicine isn't likely to change the outlook dramatically; drugs and surgery can do only so much to sustain a body once it starts to fail. But there is no question we can lengthen our lives while shortening our deaths. The tools already exist, and they're within virtually everyone's reach.

Life expectancy in the United States has nearly doubled since Angeline Strandal was a kid--from 47 years to 76 years. And though centenarians are still rare, they now constitute the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. Their ranks have increased 16-fold over the past six decades--from 3,700 in 1940 to roughly 61,000 today. And the explosion is just getting started. The Census Bureau projects that one in nine baby boomers (9 million of the 80 million people born between 1946 and 1964) will survive into their late 90s, and that one in 26 (or 3 million) will reach 100. "A century ago, the odds of living that long were about one in 500," says Lynn Adler, founder of the National Centenarian Awareness Project and the author of "Centenarians: The Bonus Years." "That's how far we've come." If decrepitude were an inevitable part of aging, these burgeoning numbers would spell trouble. But the evidence suggests that Americans are living better, as well as longer. The disability rate among people older than 65 has fallen steadily since the early 1980s, according to Duke University demographer Kenneth Manton, and a shrinking percentage of seniors are plagued by hypertension, arteriosclerosis and dementia. Moreover, researchers have found that the oldest of the old often enjoy better health than people in their 70s. The 79 centenarians in Perls's New England study have all lived independently through their early 90s, taking an average of just one medication. And when the time comes for these hearty souls to die, they don't linger. In a 1995 study, James Lubitz of the Health Care Financing Administration calculated that medical expenditures for the last two years of life--statistically the most expensive--average $22,600 for people who die at 70, but just $8,300 for those who make it past 100.

These insights have spawned a revolution in the science of aging. "Until recently, there was so much preoccupation with disease that little work was done on the characteristics that permit people to do well," says Dr. John Rowe, the New York geriatrician who heads the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on Successful Aging. Over the past decade, Rowe's group and others have published hundreds of studies elucidating the factors that help people glide through their later years with clear minds and strong bodies. The research confirms the old saw that it pays to choose your parents well. But the way we age depends less on who we are than on how we live--what we eat, how much we exercise and how we employ our minds.

The Magic of Exercise

Suppose there was a potion that could keep you strong and trim as you aged, while protecting your heart and bones; improving your mood, sleep and memory; warding off breast and colon cancer, and reducing your overall risk of dying prematurely.

Respectable studies have shown that exercise can have all those benefits--even for people who take it up late in life. Experts now agree that most of the physical decline that older people suffer stems not from age but from simple disuse. When we sit all day, year after year, our bones, muscles and organ systems atrophy. But exercise can preserve and even revive them.

When Dr. Ralph Paffenbarger started tracking the health of 19,000 Harvard and University of Pennsylvania alumni back in the early 1960s, many experts thought vigorous exercise was downright dangerous for people over 50. But by monitoring the volunteers' activity levels and health status over the years, the Stanford epidemiologist turned that wisdom on its head. In a landmark 1986 study, Paffenbarger showed that the participants' death rates fell in direct proportion to the number of calories they burned each week. Those burning 2,000 a week (roughly the number it takes to walk 20 miles) suffered only half the annual mortality of the couch potatoes, thanks mainly to a lower rate of heart disease.

The alumni study wasn't set up to gauge the benefits of any particular exercise regimen, but subsequent studies have shown that different activities bring different rewards. Everyone now agrees that aerobic exercise preserves the heart, lungs and brain. And researchers at Tufts University have recently shown that weight lifting can do as much for the frail elderly as it does for high-school jocks. When Dr. Maria Fiatarone got 10 chronically ill nursing-home residents to lift weights three times a week for two months, the participants' average walking speed nearly tripled, and their balance improved by half. Two had the audacity to throw away their canes.

Miriam Nelson, another Tufts researcher, has since shown how a series of simple strength-training exercises could help keep women from resorting to canes in the first place. She recruited 40 volunteers--all past menopause, none taking estrogen--and split them into two groups. Half continued life as usual, while the other half went to Tufts twice a week to pump iron. Over the course of a year, the women in the control group suffered a predictable loss of bone density, but the weight lifters enjoyed slight increases. They didn't lose weight (that wasn't the goal), but they lost fat, and many ended up measurably stronger than their daughters, who were 30 to 40 years younger. Dorothy Barron, who was 64 when she joined Nelson's experiment, says the experience not only remodeled her body but gave her more energy and confidence than she had had since her youth. Five years later, she still lifts weights--and she has added power walking, horseback riding and white-water rafting to her hobbies. When people ask why she pushes herself so hard, she replies, "I'm too old not to."

Eating to Nourish Long Life

We all know that living on fat, salt and empty calories can have a range of nasty consequences, from obesity and impotence to hypertension and heart disease. Yet we seem to forget that there are other ways to eat, and that people who adopt them stay younger longer. George and Gaynel Couron will never forget that lesson. The Sacramento, Calif., couple gave up eating meat back in the early 1920s, when they became Seventh-day Adventists. They eventually strayed from the church and its dietary edicts, but they returned to both in 1943, when George suffered a heart attack. Today he's 100 years old, and Gaynel is 98. They've been married for 81 years and have 14 kids ranging in age from 58 to 80. They have slowed down a bit (they're not planning any more children), but George still takes great delight in growing and eating his own tomatoes, melons, beets, squash and black-eyed peas. As he puts it, "We're still perking along." No one can say exactly what role food has played in the Courons' good fortune, but the age-reversing effects of a plant-based diet are not in question. In controlled studies, San Francisco cardiologist Dean Ornish has shown that a diet based on low-fat, nutrient-rich foods not only prevents heart disease--the Western world's leading cause of early death--but can help reverse it. And other studies suggest that dietary changes could virtually eliminate the high blood pressure that places 50 million older Americans at high risk of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure.

"Hypertension is not an inevitable part of aging," says Dr. Boyd Eaton, an Atlanta-based radiologist who has written extensively on nutrition and chronic illness. "It's a disease of civilization." You wouldn't know that from watching people age in this country. Hypertension afflicts a third of all Americans in their 50s, half of those in their 60s and more than two thirds of those over 70. But preindustrial people don't follow that pattern. Whether they happen to live in China or Africa, Alaska or the Amazon, people in primitive settings experience no change in blood pressure as they age, and the reason is fairly simple: they don't eat processed foods. Dr. Paul Whelton of Tulane University's School of Public Health has spent the past decade tracking 15,000 indigenous Yi people in southwestern China. As long as they eat a traditional diet--rice, a little meat and a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables--these rural farmers virtually never develop hypertension. But when they migrate to nearby towns, their blood pressure starts to rise with age. "Their genes don't change when they move," Whelton says. "Their diet does."

What makes processed food so harmful? Salt is one key suspect. When you subsist mainly on fresh plant foods--as our ancestors did for roughly 7 million years--you get 10 times more potassium than sodium. That 10-to-one ratio is, by Eaton's reasoning, the one our bodies are designed for. But salt is now showered on foods at every stage of processing and preparation (a 4-ounce tomato contains 9 mg of sodium, 4 ounces of bottled tomato sauce nearly 700 mg), while potassium leaches out. As a result, most of us now consume more salt than potassium. "Modern humans are the only mammals that do that," says Eaton, "and we're the only ones that develop hypertension." Correcting that imbalance takes some effort, but it doesn't require moving to the bush. In fact a recent clinical study suggests that dietary changes can reduce blood pressure as markedly as drug treatment, and can produce results in as little as two months. In the study (known as DASH, or Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), researchers at several institutions placed volunteers on one of three diets. Those on a low-fat menu that included 10 daily servings of fresh fruits and vegetables, plus two servings of calcium-rich dairy products, reduced their systolic and diastolic readings by 5.5 mm and 3.0 mm, respectively. And those suffering from hypertension got reductions of twice that magnitude. "We suspected this was possible," says nutritionist Eva Obarzanek of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the federal agency that sponsored the study. "Now we know the size of the effect."

Researchers have since shown that a simple potassium supplement can bring similar if less dramatic benefits. That's worth knowing, but keep in mind that potassium is just one of countless age fighters found in real food. The antioxidant vitamins in a tomato or a green leaf can help boost immunity and slow the corrosion of aging cell membranes, and the B vitamins may help protect your heart. By eating plants, you also bathe yourself in cancer-fighting phytochemicals, bone-saving calcium and the fiber needed to maintain the colon and modulate blood sugar. Best of all, you can down them by the bushel without getting fat.

Staying Connected and Engaged

Exercise and good food may help keep you going, but successful aging is also a psychological feat. Loneliness, for example, can speed your demise no matter how conscientiously you care for your body. "We go through life surrounded by protective convoys of others," says Robert Kahn, a University of Michigan psychologist who has studied the health effects of companionship. "People who manage to maintain a network of social support do best." One study of elderly heart-attack patients found that those with two or more close associates enjoyed twice the one-year survival rate of those who were completely alone.

Companionship aside, healthy oldsters seem to share a knack for managing stress, a poison that contributes measurably to heart disease, cancer and accidents. Researchers have also linked successful aging to mental stimulation. An idle brain will deteriorate just as surely as an unused leg, notes Dr. Gene Cohen, head of the gerontology center at George Washington University. And just as exercise can prevent muscle atrophy, mental challenges seem to preserve both the mind and the immune system. But what most impresses researchers who study the oldest old is their simple drive and resilience. "People who reach 100 are not quitters," says Adler of the National Centenarian Awareness Project. "They share a remarkable ability to renegotiate life at every turn, to accept the inevitable losses and move on." Merle McEathron knows all about accepting losses. She's 102 today, but she was just 7 when she found her mother dead on the floor at her childhood home in Vincennes, Ind., felled by a heart attack. As the oldest girl in the family, Merle had to raise her baby sister and take over cooking and cleaning for her father and two older brothers ("I stood on a box to reach the range," she recalls). She married at 15, but her man left her at 25, so she started a general store and worked there long enough to put both of her sons through college. The boys were grown by the time World War II came along, but she found other ways to stay busy. She worked as a house mother at the Cadet Club, a military social center, where young airmen took her flying in small warplanes after hours. And when the war ended, she got in her Buick and headed for Arizona.

She was 51 years old by the time she hit Phoenix, but the move brought many adventures, including three more husbands. After dumping one (a dance-hall sax player with a roving eye) and outliving the others, she moved herself into the Eastern Star retirement center to avoid getting lonely. A doctor assured her she would never walk again when she broke her leg four years ago, but she got herself a walker, made her way down to the exercise room and worked the injured limb until she could get around on a cane. Then she threw away the cane. She now walks a mile and a quarter each day, and every September she travels to Indiana for a reunion at the Cadet Club. When she gets there, she climbs over the wing of a restored World War II training plane, crawls into the cockpit behind the pilot and rides that baby into the sky.

With Anne Underwood and Mary Hager
Newsweek 6/30/97 Lifestyle/How to Live to 100

* * *

I emphasized the entire last section because I read this article a long time ago, but I still think about that woman regularly. Screw what the doctor tells you! Such quacks.

Birthday Two-fer

http://www.ohio.com/news/17937024.html?page=1&c=y

Family, friends honoring 2 centenarians

No secrets to aging, but hard work helps

By Jewell Cardwell
Beacon Journal columnist

Published on Saturday, Apr 19, 2008

Their families have spared no expense nor investment of time in planning two supremely important birthday bashes today.

While the honorees' lives probably have never intersected — not formally, anyway — they share a common thread.

Josephine Fuller and Elvina Gulley are not only turning the corner on 100 years of living, but they also are doing so with style, grace and a real enthusiasm for the bridges they've crossed and what still lies ahead.

Mrs. Fuller

Josephine (Kightlinger) Fuller has always marched to the beat of her drum.

It's served her well so far.

As she approaches her 100th birthday, she sees no reason to change the recipe.

I met her this week at Forrest Motors of Ohio Inc. in Barberton, which is owned by her son Forrest C. Fuller. She is one of the partners in the parent company — Al for Limited.

Mrs. Fuller — who still gets around remarkably well — was born April 21, 1908, in Meadville, Pa., on a dairy farm; she was one of nine children.

''It just creeps up on you,'' Mrs. Fuller said about turning 100. ''You just don't think about the time.''

By the way, Mrs. Fuller insists she doesn't have any special formula for aging so well.

''I eat anything I want, although I don't care for milk,'' an animated-and-engaging Mrs. Fuller noted. ''But I do like yogurt.''

Mrs. Fuller, dressed in casual chic clothing like you might see on the golf course, has two children, Forrest of Atwater and Duane of Staten Island, N.Y. A third son, Jack, is deceased.

She also has 10 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and just recently celebrated the birth of her first great-great-grandchild.

One thing is for sure; they've got a treasure chest of stories from the family matriarch, guaranteed to educate and entertain them for many years to come.

''I learned to do everything,'' Mrs. Fuller took great pride in saying.

At an early age, she even found herself charged with driving a milk truck.

She recalled one time while making her rounds, ''the brakes gave out and I was just shaking.''

Somehow she kept her wits about her and she announced, ''I still got the milk to where it was supposed to go and on time.''

Mrs. Fuller met her husband Charles at 17 and was married at 19.

They had been married 72 years when he died in 2000.

He worked a variety of jobs, including farmer, meat cutter and self-taught musician.

She was a seamstress, doing everything by hand.

The couple also worked together for many years caring for people with mental disabilities.

''When she was in the independent-living apartment, she was beating the pants off of everyone in poker. She's unbeatable!'' boasted daughter-in-law A.J. Fuller.

These days, Mrs. Fuller resides in an apartment in Marlboro Township. She shares cooking on the weekends with another friend.

She formerly pursued oil painting and crocheting. ''I've made so many afghans, I've lost track of the number,'' she said.

When she's not out walking or watching television's Wheel of Fortune or Lawrence Welk Show reruns, Mrs. Fuller enjoys the company of Chester, her Bijon Fraise dog.

Except for a daily blood pressure pill, she's in incredibly good health.

Mrs. Fuller will be honored at a birthday bash at the Tangier restaurant in Akron with local musician Larry Altop performing.


Mrs. Gulley


Elvina (Marshall) Gulley isn't nearly as excited about turning 100 as she is about the prospects of having an African-American president.

Her eyes light up and her voice moves into a higher octave as talk turns to Sen. Barack Obama and his amazing journey — Something Mrs. Gulley, who is also African-American, said she never thought she would see in her lifetime.

''He has my vote!'' she wanted me to know.

Mrs. Gulley is conversant on a wide range of subjects, including cooking and canning.

Nattily dressed in a light blue suit, Mrs. Gulley is in remarkably good health given her advanced years.

She was born March 18, 1908, to Simon Marshall and Narcissus Patterson Marshall in Repton, Ala., the fourth of 14 children, with 12 growing to maturity.

She and her husband, Willie E. Gulley, moved to Springfield Township in 1953. They were married for 49 years before his death in 1974.

The Gulleys also had 14 children, with 12 growing to maturity.

Mrs. Gulley's children are Robert of Mobile, Ala.; Judge of Akron; Willie Pearl Davidson of Pensacola, Fla.; Amanda Mims of Akron; Clara Tolbert of Pensacola; Ben and James, both of Akron; Cornelia Isabell and Delores Gulley Drone, both of Akron; and Walter, David, William, John Lee and Eloise, all deceased.

No stranger to hard work, Mrs. Gulley farmed in her native Alabama.

She also was a bit of an entrepreneur, ''growing vegetables and selling them to 'mobile' grocers or rolling stores, as they were called, in exchange for the items she needed to take care of her children and her household,'' said daughter Delores Gulley Drone.

''The lights rarely went out in our house at night, as she created and made clothing for the boys and girls in her family.''

Mrs. Gulley also was a prolific quilter. ''I used to make mattresses for the beds, too,'' she said of the leftover cotton she used to pick.

''She taught her children well with the meager academics she possessed,'' Gulley Drone said. ''She would help them with their homework and emphasized education and school attendance.

''She also taught them all — boys and girls — how to be good cooks and housekeepers. . . . She never failed to remember that her children needed to honor God in all their efforts. So, she made sure they attended Sunday school and church regularly.''

Mrs. Gulley also has 56 grandchildren, 89 great-grandchildren, 72 great-greatgranchildren and 73 nieces and nephews.

Asked for her recipe for a long and happy life, she had a simple answer. ''Hard work. I don't think it hurt me a bit,'' she said.

Genes may have been a factor, too, as she had a sister who lived to be 105 and an aunt lived to be 107.

The best thing anyone ever said about her? ''That they never known no one who worked as hard as me and that I'm a good person,'' she was happy to reply.

Mrs. Gulley will be feted today with a party at the Cathedral Buffet in Cuyahoga Falls.

Jewell Cardwell can be reached at 330-996-3567 or jcardwell@thebeaconjournal.com.

100 Year Old Woman, Newly Minted Hunter, Is Local Best

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2755245.html?menu=news.quirkies


Woman, 100, is top hunter

A 100-year-old Russian woman who took up hunting because she was bored has been declared the best hunter in her area.

And the only other person able to keep up with Maria Pokacheva, 100, is another granny aged 90.

Pokacheva has shot 65 squirrels, rabbits and other furry mammals, and her pal Anna Vandymovu, 90, has managed 58.

Both women are being hailed by local politicians from their hometown Kogalym where hunting prowess is highly regarded as an example to the young.

"They are true free spirits and we are very happy to count them as among our own," a spokesman for the mayor Sergei Kakotkin says.

The women have been invited to a special ceremony by local MPs where they will be awarded for their hunting achievements.



Free spirits indeed! Boredom will kill you. Roll with the punches by keeping yourself entertained and maintaining a sense of self-efficacy, which promotes further independence.

Centenarian Ex-Dancer Still Works Out

http://www.sunsetbeacon.com/archives/richmondreview/2002editions/Nov02/Hunt.html

Centenarian Still Dances to the Joyous Sounds of Life

by David Ryan Alexander

She was once a dancer for Lawrence Welk, lived through both World Wars and the Great Depression, and has outlived several of her own grandchildren. On Nov. 4, Richmond District resident Alby Hunt will celebrate her 100th birthday.


Her advice for living so happily for so long and maintaining energy and clarity of mind: "Always keep moving. Don't sit still, and don't let anybody always take you by the hand. You have to do it for yourself."

With that she leaned back in her rocking chair for an extra boost and launched herself onto her feet. Once landing, she proclaimed, "I'm almost 100 and I don't have any cane or any walker," and then proceeded with her signature jig dance, swiveling her hips and her arms with a broad smile across her face.

From her youth Hunt has always been a dancer. She recalls her days in Chicago when she danced for Lawrence Welk and the Navy dances she attended with her girlfriends where she met her husband.

"I'm so happy I'm still on my own two feet. I was always a dancer," she said.

In fact, one of the first items she requested when she came to St. Anne's Home for the elderly at the age of 90 was a workout video. She quickly encouraged many of the other residents to participate. They still work out to it five times a week.

Hunt still makes the effort to maintain her appearances, and is sometimes mistaken to be only 75 years old by people that do not know her. She wears large glasses that display her bold eyes, that are both alive and aware, and her mouth is always as eager to smile as her still-agile legs are to dance. Although she is small in size, the bounces she makes with each step defy both her age and her height.

A typical day for Hunt includes regular meals and socializing, but it also consists of regular exercise.


Right after breakfast and lunch she makes her way to the exercise room and workouts on her favorite machine. When she is finished some of the other residents often offer their assistance getting her off the bicycle, but she brushes them away and sprightly climbs off on her own. After a 10-minute rest on the nearby sofa, she continues on with her day.

In addition to the constant activity that Hunt has always filled her life with, she also finds the secret to long life in her love for raisins.

"I've eaten raisins everyday of my life for years," she said.

Besides raisins, she still eats most of whatever she wants, including her favorite food, cake, without the frosting.

Having been the oldest of eight children, Hunt remembers how much her mother relied on her to help out with all of her young siblings.

From a very early age she had to take on a great deal of responsibility and was constantly running about trying to take care of everything. In particular, she was always in charge of hanging up the laundry for their family of 10.

All of the children were raised in Chicago, so during the winter she would have to climb into the attic to hang up all of the clothes to dry. She attributes this chore to the beginning of a life of constant activity.

Hunt and her husband raised two daughters, who are both still alive and living in California.

About eight years ago, while on an outing with residents of St. Anne's, Hunt's heart unexpectedly faltered and she was rushed to the hospital, where she was given a pacemaker.

When she came back to St. Anne's after her release from the hospital, the first thing she recalled saying was, "Now I'm going to live forever."


* * *


So we see she has a great sense of humor and is constantly active--with formal exercise, dance, and keeping busy with chores. She embodies what she advises with her "earnest personality" (as described by a researcher from another article) that spurs her to up and do what she knows she needs, e.g., immediately getting an exercise video at the nursing home. She didn't wait for anybody for take care of her own needs; you ultimately are responsible for you.

Raisins have lots of important nutrients that may contribute to the health benefits observed in red wine, though red wine, when fermented properly (most manufacturers usually cut corners), loses all the sugar content while further enhancing the nutritious phytochemical properties. One added benefit of raisins themselves though is that they can be high in salicylates. If you'll recall, aspirin, widely touted for its health benefits, is a salicylate. Women tend to be resistant to aspirin's benefits while still suffering side effects like intestinal damage, so dried fruits high in salicylates may be a better bet.

There are some factors helping Alby Hunt that we can't control, such as her small body size, her sex, and being a first born child. But her lifestyle should inspire us all to increase quality and quantity of life by vigilantly exercising. If she's 100 and makes herself go workout after every breakfast and lunch, why can't you kids who are a quarter of her age?

Oldest Recognized Person In World Is 115 Year Old American Woman

http://www.star-telegram.com/national_news/story/592046.html
Posted Saturday, April 19, 2008

Genes of people 110 and older may hold clues to longevity
By RICK CALLAHAN
The Associated Press




AP/DARRON CUMMINGS
Edna Parker, born April 20, 1893, at her 115-birthday party in Shelbyville, Ind., on Friday. She is the oldest known person.

SHELBYVILLE, Ind. -- Maybe it was a lifetime of chores on the family farm that accounts for Edna Parker's long life. Or maybe just good genes explain why the world's oldest known person will turn 115 on Sunday, defying staggering odds.

Scientists who study longevity hope supercentenarians -- Parker and others who live to 110 or beyond -- can help uncover the mystery of extreme longevity.

"We don't know why she's lived so long," said Don Parker, her 59-year-old grandson. "But she's never been a worrier, and she's always been a thin person, so maybe that has something to do with it."

On Friday, Parker laughed and smiled as relatives and guests released 115 balloons into sunny skies outside her nursing home. Dressed in pearls, a blue and white polka dot dress and new white shoes, she clutched a red rose during the festivities.

Two years ago, researchers from the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University took a blood sample from Parker for the group's DNA database of supercentenarians.

Her DNA is now preserved with DNA samples of about 100 other people who made the 110-year milestone and whose genes are being analyzed, said Dr. Tom Perls, an aging specialist who directs the project.

"They're really our best bet for finding the elusive Holy Grail of our field, which are these longevity-enabling genes," he said.

Sixty-four women and 11 men are 110 or older, according to the Gerontology Research Group, based in Inglewood, Calif., which verifies reports of extreme ages.

Parker, who was born April 20, 1893, was recognized by Guinness World Records in August as the oldest of that group after the death of a Japanese woman four months her senior.

A widow since her husband, Earl, died in 1938 of a heart attack, Parker lived alone in their farmhouse until age 100, when she moved into her son Clifford's home. She cheated death a few months later.

One winter's night, Clifford and his wife returned home from a high school basketball game to find her missing. Don, their son, says he discovered his grandmother in the snowy darkness near the farm's apple orchard. He scooped up her rigid body and rushed back to the house.

"She was stiff as a two-by-four. We really thought that was the end of her," he said.

But Parker recovered fully, suffering only frostbitten fingertips.

Fifteen years later, her room at the Heritage House Convalescent Center in Shelbyville, Ind., about 25 miles southeast of Indianapolis, is adorned with teddy bears and photos of her five grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and 13 great-great grandchildren. She's outlived her two sons, Clifford and Earl Jr.

Her sisters, Georgia and Opal, lived to 99 and 88, respectively.

-----------------



So longevity seems to run in her family to some extent, but more factors must explain why she's the oldest person in the world while her sisters "only" made it to their 80s and 90s.

I think it's interesting that she's resilient enough to have "cheated death" by surviving a stint of freezing in the snow. Besides her will to survive, an attitude which is widely pointed to as having beneficial effects on actual survival, it's recognized that brief environmental stressors on the body can upregulate genes that promote an efficient survival mode. Exposure to cold has been mentioned as one of these mechanisms (as are caloric restriction and intermittent fasting).

I'm not suggesting that her longevity is mostly or even significantly explained by her battle with exposure, but it did remind me of research which showed a lower body temperature correlates with longer life, probably as a marker of a slower metabolism. It could be triggered by any number of factors, including a survival mechanism, I'm sure. I've also seen research proving that brief exposure to cold stimulates the immune system, which is why I take cold showers! I wonder if her body was already in survival mode, which is why she survived exposure in the first place, or if the experience further upregulated ancient feast-or-famine type genes. Or perhaps it boosted her immunity to pathogens like that which causes pneumonia, which commonly claims the elderly by preying on their weakened immunity. I'd be interested in seeing what lead to her sisters' mortality to see if it was lifestyle/weight, something influenced by not having an even-keeled attitude, or a failure of immunity.

Moving on. Her story is a microcosm of many other factors we hear about time and again; we see the importance of personal independence after her husband died in the 1930s (!), and her ability to rely on people as a support system, like when she moved in with her family as her independence deteriorated. You don't have to pop out kids or have a great family, however; research shows any type of social support is an equal or MORE effect substitute than relying on kin.

Her trump card is her attitude, however. She outlived both her children and still didn't let depression and sadness rock her too hard.

Me? I would have been watching a flock of red birthday balloons escape to the sky and had anxiety about pollution and the dolphins that choke on the rubber when it inevitably ends up in the sea. Then I think about the mass extinction of incredible species all due to these homo sapien parasites, progressively worsening my anxiety and attitude, and then I realize I'll probably never be a centenarian.

Edited to add:

I have no idea why that source cuts out the last section of the original article, but it goes on to consult specialist on aging research, who opines that most centenarians have both genes and lifestyle in their favor, and that one of the biggest key commonalities among all of them is that they handle stress well. They don't dwell on stressful events of the past, which can prevent all kinds of health problems: stroke, heart attacks, etc.

Bergen County Asian Women Longest Lived Group In U.S.

A September 12, 2006 article in the NY Times first reported on the demographics of longevity according to a Harvard study:

"Many other national studies have shown disparities among races, with Asian-Americans living longest, followed by whites and Hispanics, and blacks having the shortest life spans.

But the Harvard researchers highlighted the figure for Asian-American women in Bergen County, an average life expectancy of 91.1 years — a number that Dr. Murray called extraordinary, even in light of the longer life spans of Asian-Americans and women. It was the highest average the researchers found anywhere in the country for any racial subgroup in a county with a large enough number of deaths to be considered statistically significant."

A follow-up story, originally available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/nyregion/14asians.html, ran two days later to explore the lives of some members of this long-lived group:

Study Counts the Years, Asians Count the Reasons
By TINA KELLEY
Published: September 14, 2006

Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

Free time at the Long Life Adult Day Care Center in Cliffside Park, N.J., where activities include line dancing, karaoke and mah-jongg.

CLIFFSIDE PARK, N.J., Sept. 13 — Son Man Soon, 93, spends her afternoons at the Long Life Adult Day Care Center watching a handful of women her age learn line dances, or singing along, karaoke-style, with Korean words on a large television screen. Some of her peers play mah-jongg or pool, some knit, and later, they enjoy meals of soybean sprout soup and kimchi.

“Around here, these people, they don’t die,” Ms. Soon said, laughing. She lives by herself in a nearby apartment, and, aside from occasional trouble with her legs, considers herself healthy.

Around here, in Bergen County, Harvard researchers have found a surprising pocket of longevity. Asian women here live longer than any other ethnic subgroup of people in the nation, according to federal statistics. Their average lifespan is 91.1 years, compared with 77.5 for the general population, 86.7 for Asian women nationally, and about 80 years for Bergen County as a whole, a figure that places it first in the Northeast.

“I believe they got better medications and food, and they’re comfortable,” Ms. Soon said through a translator, referring to the Korean women in their 80’s and 90’s surrounding her. “Their kids are all well educated.”

In dozens of interviews here, at a nursing home in Paramus, a Japanese market in Edgewater and a center for the aged in Fort Lee, elderly women from Korea, China and Hong Kong attributed their longevity to a healthy diet, belief in God, and their close-knit communities in the well-off suburbs that hug the Hudson River and the New York State border. They also said the conveniences of life in these towns, and the proximity to top-notch medical care, helped ease the path to their next birthdays.

For the Korean population, however, the average might be slightly skewed, since some Koreans, at least, count their age from conception and base it on the lunar year, factors that may not have been accounted for in census figures, one of the study’s authors said. Pun Park, for example, was born in 1911 but gave her age as 97.

“I didn’t eat beef or meat, and I usually take my main dish as vegetables,” said Ms. Park, who energetically offered apples and oranges as she recounted a life so full of farming, raising four children and doing household chores that it allowed little time for sickness.

The average life expectancies were calculated by researchers who monitored slices of the population — say, 80- to 85-year-olds — to see how many survived over a period of time. The data provides insight into how long a typical person in a specific place or ethnic group who is born today can be expected to live.

The Harvard researchers found Asian women in other places to have even longer life expectancies, but their numbers were too small to be statistically significant. In Bergen County, according to the 2000 census, there are more than 48,000 Asian women. The study appears in the new issue of the journal PLoS Medicine.

Majid Ezzati, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, said that Asians as a whole have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver disease. Some of the risk factors for those diseases, such as smoking, binge drinking, obesity and high cholesterol, are less prevalent in the Asian community. But exact causes of longevity remain a mystery.

“It’s always a lot harder to explain why somebody lives long than why they don’t,” Dr. Ezzati said. But the women, most of whom immigrated as adults, some when they were already grandparents, were willing to guess why.

“I think it’s because their minds are comfortable,” said Hwang Song Gi, 78, “because every day they have a schedule, with lunch at the same time, and dinner, and exercise.” She is a regular at the Long Life center and goes to church three times a week, and said the government provides for her generously.

“If I’m sick, the health care is coming over and taking care of me,” she said. “We’ve got better quality health care than in other countries.”

Strong families also play a role, said Betty Lee of Franklin Lakes, who was taking her mother, Ching Lin, 88, to lunch at the food court of the Mitsuwa Marketplace, which sells trays of gelatinous Japanese sweets along with shelves full of vitamins, groceries, and appliances.

“They like to stay with the families,” she said. “With their kids, they could live longer. If they went to a nursing home they would be lonely to death.” Her mother, who is Chinese, has a fixed daily schedule, with tai chi at 5:30 a.m., and three visits from relatives throughout the day.

Hyun W. Lee, 77, of Palisades Park, said Asian women live longer in part because of their faith. “They forgive and trust and try not to do bad things,” said Ms. Lee, who goes to the True Light Presbyterian Church in Teaneck. “And they are thankful to God.”

And there are excellent parks in Bergen County, she pointed out. “Everything here is much better than in other countries,” said Ms. Lee, who has also lived in Korea and Europe and enjoys swimming and dancing several times a week.

Margaret Leung, 72, who is originally from Hong Kong and was painting with watercolors at the Richard A. Nest Senior Center in Fort Lee, said she suspected that Asian women may live longer because they are generally happy.

“I don’t think about my age,” she said, recounting how she still enjoys golfing with her husband, and traveling to her homeland. “I don’t feel old. I try to feel young all the time.”

Yet many of the women said they had no burning desire to make it to the century mark.

At the Korean Long Term Care Service at Bergen Regional Medical Center in Paramus, where the beds are low to the floor and the artwork on the wall tends toward watercolors and calligraphy, Myung Soon Kim, 93, said, “I’ve lived long enough, oh, my gosh.”

Ms. Kim’s only complaint — the only medical complaint, anyhow — is a little high blood pressure, and she attributes her impressive age to the way she eats a little at a time, “mainly fresh salads and vegetables.”

Back at the Long Life center, Ms. Soon said her children “go to church and pray for me to live a little more time.” But she would rather they not go to the trouble. “It’s about time to go to heaven,” she said.