100 100-Year-Olds at a Loss to Explain Their Longevity

SEATTLE —  Why do some people live to be 100?

“I have nothing to do with this getting old,” protested Mary Wallace, 106, a child of slaves in Georgia who raised white children as well as her own family of nine.

Here’s the secret from Palmina Canovi, 101: “We’re so old because we haven’t died yet.”

Author Jim Heynen and photographer Paul Boyer spent 1987 through 1989 traveling the United States and Canada to talk with centenarians about their lives.

The result is “One Hundred Over 100,” a book of interviews with 100 North Americans in their second century of life.

Heynen, 49, got the idea for the book while jogging and thinking about aging. Boyer, 45, joined later to take the black-and-white portraits that accompany each brief interview.

“I think most people do not respond well to old people. . . . Most people equate growing old with growing sickly,” Heynen said in a joint interview with Boyer recently.

“May this book diminish your fear of aging,” he wrote in the introduction.

The 100 subjects are not a representative sample of the 54,000 Americans that the U.S. Census Bureau estimates will be at least 100 years old in 1990.

Heynen sent news releases to about 100 newspapers seeking nominees for the book. He also sought out minority centenarians.

The interviewees include 10 blacks, two Latinos, three American Indians and three Japanese-Americans. Some of the Anglos were immigrants. Women outnumber men by 3 to 2.

Still, there is something of all of us in each of them, the authors found.

Some had survived cancer, bad hearts and life-threatening diseases. Many married and divorced several times. Some smoked and drank. Some broke all family records for longevity. Some were worrywarts. Some loved salt.

The authors also found that many of the men were Masons. Two bald men began growing their hair back after age 100.

The longest-lived group were single women without children, but common traits appeared to be no children or one child, a careful diet all their lives and a lot of caring for others, both relatives and strangers, Heynen said.

“Many of these people have lived altruistic lives,” Heynen said.