My volunteer work brings me into contact with a whole mess of old folks. Some of them I would actually say I know.
Several of the vets I work with at the VA home are WWII vets ranging from 89 to 96. A couple of my ladies at the rehab center are in their late 90s. One of the women in the Democratic women’s group is 97 and still drives herself (and a younger friend!) to meetings and events, lives in her own home and does her own housework and gardening. She makes me look like a piker at 50.
The oldest person that I’ve ever known was a woman in the nursing facility where I worked in college. She was 106 when she passed. She had been a suffragette back in the day and would regale us with tales of getting arrested on nights when she had difficulties sleeping.
Even though we didn’t know her, for the longest time the wife and I would send a birthday card every year to Jeanne Calment when she was alive, just for grins. She was the oldest person ever recorded, dying at the verified age of 122. We simply addressed it “Jeanne Calment, World’s Oldest Person, Arles, France.” The cards were never returned by the post office, so we assumed she received them. But one year while selecting her card, I was looking at one that said, “Some people are richer than you, and some people are older than you …” Uh-oh! Couldn’t send that one!
I don’t know him well, but I have a close friend who’s next door neighbor is 102 years old and was an intelligence officer in WW2. During the last days of the war and the days following the surrender he was active in interrogating many German officers who surrendered or were captured and he attended some of the Nuremberg trials. Unfortunately he’s deaf as a post and very cranky, so there’s no way I could ask him about them. (He is the only person ever to own the house he lives in, which was built just after the war; cleaning out that place when he passes is going to be a nightmare.)
104 year amateur radio operator in California. Can barely hear, but still clicking away with Morse Code and still ambulatory. He’s got to be one of the oldest hams in the US if not the world by now.
Ever: one of my great-aunts on my mother’s side made it to 100. One of my great-uncles on my father’s side died at 99, just 6 or 7 weeks before what would have been his 100th birthday party.
My mother-in-law died about a year ago, at 97. Still pretty sharp, lived by herself in the same house she was in for sixty years. One day she planted her tomatoes in the garden in back of her house, had dinner with her grandson, his wife, and her great-grandchildren, and then laid down that night and went to Heaven.
My great-grandfather on my father’s side made it to 91. He and my great-grandmother were married for over 70 years.
