And yet: stoic. Almost to a person. At least the people I met. To be fair, one fellow with whom I spoke on the phone while I was still searching for my first interview, an older gentleman who worked at a facility in D.C., referred to World War I veterans as “the complainingest bunch of bastards I ever saw in my life.” Maybe he was just having a bad day. Or maybe it’s true, and the people I met just happened to all be stoic because you pretty much have to be that way if you’re going to live to be 100.
Happily, not everyone told me that the secret to their longevity was just to relax and not worry; that would have been mighty boring. Art Fiala, for one, said at first that he had no secret. Then he said his secret was that he ate peanuts twice a day, every day. The next time I visited him, I asked him again; this time, when he started in about the peanuts, his son, Carl, broke in: “Well, I think it’s brandy.”
Apparently, a doctor had once told Art that every evening he, the doctor, took a shot of whiskey. “I thought, God damn it, that sounds pretty good. I’ll try, too,” Art explained. “He’s been furnishing me with brandy for how many years . . . I get every night a little cup with so much brandy in there.”
“It’s a good few shots,” Carl clarified.
On the other hand, there was the centenarian who volunteered: “You know why I’m here? I’m not a boozehound, and I never chased [women] around.”
And here I must confess that asking people for the secret to their longevity is often not a very satisfying experience. “Use common sense and moderation in everything you do,” one woman told me. “I didn’t overeat,” a man said; “I have always taken exercise,” offered another. A few said “clean living.” “I don’t drink or smoke, so I think that helps a lot,” one speculated; several others offered the same theory. “The organs of the body is what regulates the body,” one supercentenarian explained, after offering that he, too, never smoked or drank. “You get them in bad shape, I don’t care what the outside of the body is doing, it’s just in bad shape.” And then there was the fellow who elaborated: “I never abused my body. In fact, when I quit smoking [after thirty years!], it took me two years to get rid of the phlegm in my lungs.” (I guess he figured it doesn’t count as abuse until you’ve been smoking for thirty-five years.) “You’ve got to believe,” offered someone else, also echoing what several others said, “first, in our Lord, our God. He’s the master of all things. And when I say he’s the master, he is the master of all things.”
Not every centenarian I met was a goody two-shoes. A lot of them confessed that they had no idea why they had lived so long; “I couldn’t tell you that for a million dollars,” a supercentenarian reported, shaking his head. One woman confessed that she sometimes lay awake in bed at night, asking herself why God hadn’t taken her yet. “Why am I staying here?” she wondered. “What am I to do before I leave?”
“I don’t know, and nobody else knows,” one gentleman stated. “There ain’t any [secret], I guess,” said another. One winked and just said, “It’s a secret”; apparently, as much a secret to him as to anyone else. And that fellow in Orting, Washington—“I’ll tell you what I tell everyone,” he told me. “None of your Goddamn business!” He was kind enough to elaborate: “You’ve got to figure it out yourselves, because I ain’t telling you nothing. Because I don’t want to.” He was a real peach, that guy.
“Well, I’d say good, clean living,” one man offered with a hearty nod; then, after a pause—maybe he saw the pained expression on my face, or perhaps he just decided to come clean—he added: “Good whiskey.” But then, for some reason, he reconsidered again. “Skip the good whiskey,” he demurred—speaking, no doubt, to posterity. “I always figured a good, clean life.” I asked him the same question again two years later. “I say it runs in the family,” he replied, finally offering an explanation no one could argue with.
Several said they were “just lucky”; “If you live another day, you’re lucky,” one philosophized. “Eat what they give you, and that’s all you can do,” offered another. “I got a pretty good cook,” yet another bragged.
“Get plenty of sleep and plenty of food,” one man told me. “Don’t worry about politics or who’s winning the war in Asia [this was in 2004] or anything like that. Just keep a low profile and get plenty of sleep. And watch TV a lot.” As much as I liked that response, my favorite—by which I mean, the only one I actually tried—came from a gentleman in upstate New York, who told me he ate bee pollen every day. Ah, I thought, something I can actually do. I went out and tracked some down, and immediately started eating a teaspoon of it every day—which, it turns out, may be harder than just plain clean living, because, as I quickly discovered, bee pollen tastes absolutely awful, and is textured so that you have to drink at least a full glass of water just to get it down. Nevertheless, I still eat it—when I remember to—because the person who offered me that advice happened, at the time, to be the oldest man in the entire country. Within a few months he would also be the oldest on the planet.
His name was Fred Hale Sr., and he was, in fact, not a World War I veteran, though not for lack of trying. When America entered the war, Fred Hale was working here and there—“everything I could find to do that I could get a little money from”—with a wife and three children to support. Yet he went down to the local Army recruiting station and offered his services. This was near his hometown of New Sharon, Maine, and the recruiter, knowing Fred and his family situation, sent him away, told him to “keep on doing as I was and they would call me.” They never did. He signed up for the Maine National Guard anyway. They never activated him, either.
I met him in December, 2003, just two days after his 113th birthday; he was living then in Baldwinsville, New York, near Syracuse, having moved there at the age of 109 to be near his son Fred Jr. I had read something about his upcoming birthday in a newspaper a couple of weeks earlier, and since I was going to be in that area, I decided to see if I could come by and visit with him. I already knew he hadn’t served in the war, but really, now—would you not visit with a 113-year-old man if given the chance?
I’d say that Fred Hale didn’t look 113, but what exactly is a 113-year-old supposed to look like? He wore a tan plaid shirt (it always surprised me a little bit to see centenarians wear the same clothing as everyone else; I guess maybe I expected them to be dressed like Victorian chimney sweeps?) and large horn-rimmed glasses, and an air-hose under his nose, though he didn’t appear to need it. He did seem tired, though; when I asked him if he had just had a birthday, he said, “Yeah, that’s what ails me today.” Apparently, there had been a bit of a celebration, and Mr. Hale was still recovering. “Too much excitement,” Fred Jr. explained.
Fred Harold Hale Sr. had been born in New Sharon one month before the end of 1890. His father was named Fred C. Hale; when I asked what kind of work Fred C. had done back in 1890, his son replied, “Dug in the dirt, for all I know.”
“He was a farmer?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “he was everything.”
His father did manage to keep a farm until his sons moved away; after that, it was too much work for him to continue it on his own. As a child, Fred took care of the sheep; “It was a pleasure,” he said, even when he had to haul them around on horseback in the frigid winter air. He started working outside the house, too, when he was eight or nine. I asked him what he did for fun as a kid. “Tossed a ball around the house,” he said. “That’s all.”
He went through school in New Sharon, then married Flora Mooers as soon as he graduated in 1910. “How old were you when you started dating your wife?” I asked him.
“Didn’t really date,” he answered. This is where the stereotype of Mainers as laconic and unflappable comes from: men who do anything and everything to scratch out a living, and don’t date.
Flora’s brother, John Mooers, was called up early in the war, went off to France, survived, and returned home. Eventually, Fred and Flora had five children, one of whom died in infancy of pneumonia. Fred’
s only brother became a doctor and moved to Massachusetts. In the 1920s, Fred got a job working as a mail clerk on the railroad, sorting letters on moving trains. He also worked as a handyman, retiring for good in 1957, when he was sixty-six years old. “What did you do to keep busy after you retired?” I asked him.
“Anything I could get my hands to,” he replied.
“Were you very handy?”
“Handier than the other people.” To say more than that might seem like boasting, or lying. So he didn’t.
And now we get to the legend of Fred Hale. The term “legend,” though, implies a lack of veracity, and everything I’m about to tell you is absolutely true.
From 1921 to 1937, Fred Hale rode his bicycle to work, a distance of five or six miles each way, every day. Year round. “Didn’t make any difference if it was raining or snowing or what,” his son explained. It snowed a lot in Maine. He did not own a car until he was in his late 40s.
He kept bees from the age of 12 until he was 107.
When he was in his late 80s, his wife, Flora, went to live in a nursing home a mile and a half away from their house. Fred walked there to visit her three times a day, for meals, then walked home after every meal. Often he had to wear snowshoes. He never missed a meal, even during an ice storm that crippled the state.
At 95, now a widower, he flew to Japan to visit his grandson, who was in the Navy. On his way home, he stopped in Hawaii, where he tried boogie boarding.
At 100, he went to Europe with his older son, Norman, to visit the sites where Norman had served during World War II.
When he was 103, the area was hit by a blizzard. After a few days, someone thought to go check on Fred to make sure he was OK. They found him shoveling snow—off his roof.
He continued to live alone, and to drive, until he was 107. Fred Jr. and Norman, concerned about their father, tried to force him to quit driving. “We went down to see the State Farm agent,” Fred Jr. told me, “and said we don’t want my father driving; when his insurance is due, cancel. They looked at us and said, ‘Sorry, noncancelable, guaranteed renewable, as long as he wants it.’”
At 107, he went to live at the same nursing home where his wife had spent her last days twenty years earlier. The average resident lived ninety days after moving in.
At 109, he moved to New York.
At 108, he broke his hip, and had surgery on it. The next year, he broke the other one, and had surgery on it.
At 109, he had surgery to remove cataracts from one of his eyes. At 110, he had them removed from the other one.
Somewhere in there he also broke two ribs, had his tonsils removed, and had an operation on his prostate. He always recovered very quickly.
Fred Hale was, simply, a superman. I like to think I’m pretty hearty (perhaps even—forgive me—hale), especially for a writer, yet I’m six decades younger than he was when that blizzard hit, and I can’t shovel a walkway without paying for it the next day, and maybe the day after that. I suspect State Farm is just dying to cancel my auto policy already. I don’t ride my bicycle if it’s drizzling out, much less in a snowstorm. I fall off boogie boards. Bees make me nervous.
Yes, Fred Hale was different from you and me. So were all of the other centenarians I met. Not necessarily better; I assure you that you can do things right now that none of them ever could, not even when they were your age. The difference is that it is highly unlikely that any of your things will inspire astonishment and awe in every last person who hears about them.
Don’t feel too bad, though. Most of it just comes down to genes. Fred Hale’s father lived to be 90, his mother 91. Unless science figures out a way to have you travel back in time and pick parents like his, you’re probably going to have to stick with what everybody already knows: Eat more greens. Exercise every day. Cut the smokes and the booze. Baby aspirin. Wheat germ. Maybe, if scientific and medical trends continue, the average person may someday live to be Fred Hale’s age. But they won’t be Fred Hale; by then, whatever Fred Hales are walking among us will be 140. State Farm had better start pondering that prospect.
Talking with the very oldest among us is different than talking with anyone else. You have to speak louder around them, more slowly, and still you’ll need to repeat yourself. Despite this, they are very good listeners. They are calmer than most people you meet. They are good talkers—having told a particular story so many times for so many decades, they can tell it very, very well. They’re also willing to tell you stories they haven’t told in decades, maybe ever, if you should happen to ask them the right questions. At this point, they have no reason not to tell you. In hundreds of hours of conversation, I believe I heard the phrase “I don’t want to talk about it” only once. They speak slowly, pause often; perhaps there are physical reasons for this, but it gives the impression that they are more thoughtful than other people. It makes you want to hear everything they say, to lean in close and catch every word, to wait and make sure they are through before you say anything else. They have presence, effortless gravitas. They also have accents you may have heard only in old movies, and pronounce things differently, too, like the fellow who referred time and again to the Hawkeye State as “Ioway.” Lots of people used to; most of them are dead now.
Not all the differences are in them, though; some of them will be in you. Perhaps you may find yourself unable, during such a conversation, to stop thinking, every few minutes: I’m talking to a 107-year-old man! I always caught myself, at some point or other, doing this weird mathematical/historical exercise that involved taking the person’s age and subtracting it from the year in which he or she had been born—for instance, subtract Laurence Moffitt’s age (106) from his birth year (1897) and you get 1791, the year the Bill of Rights was ratified, when George Washington was just two years into his first term. That was quite something in itself, but when I did the same exercise for Fred Hale, I came up with something truly startling. He was born in 1890, and was 113 when I met him; using my little formula, you get to the year 1777—the year of the Battle of Saratoga (take that, Burgoyne!), four years before Yorktown, six before the Paris Peace Treaty, a decade before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. In other words, in his last years, Fred Hale’s existence spanned more than half the life of the Republic.
I remember how astonished I felt when I first did that math while sitting in Fred Hale’s room in that nursing home in Baldwinsville on that cold day back in December, 2003. As I drove back to Manhattan that night, through a sudden whiteout, I thought about that fact again and again; I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that you could stick your arm into the barrel of American history, stretch it as far as you could, stretch until you imagine you can almost feel it coming out of its socket, stretch your fingers until it feels as if they’ve actually grown, and pull out—the Battle of Saratoga. Fred Hale’s grandfather Christopher C. Hale had been born in 1824, only four years after Maine became a state. He could easily have known someone who had fought at Saratoga.
As the snow fell harder, I thought, too, about a question that had occurred to me only at the very end of my talk with Mr. Hale, after I’d asked him about things like when he’d first gotten electricity or voted, things he didn’t care enough about to recall with precision. “Do you remember New Year’s Eve nineteen hundred?” I asked him. “Do you remember the turn of the century?”
“Not so much,” he answered. “I remember my minister speaking of it. That’s all . . . it didn’t sink in too deep, I guess.”
“It was just another day in their life,” his son explained.
Just another day. You worked, cared for the sheep, shoveled snow, did whatever else needed to be done. Every day. The birth of the twentieth century was no different than the passing of the nineteenth. Feeling otherwise is a luxury that we acquired as that era receded into the past and we started to look backwards at it. It is a luxury that came along with electricity, and automobiles, and farm machines, and antibiotics. It is our luxury, just as the experience o
f talking to a 106-year-old man is our experience, not theirs. J. Laurence Moffitt really didn’t give a thought to his age. He was inside it. His age, his wisdom, his insights, his experiences—they were all mine to take. He didn’t even know he was giving.
I guess what I’m saying is this: Hanging out with centenarians is, in every sense of the word, awesome. I highly recommend it.
7
Give a Little Credit to the Navy
WHILE THEY MAY BE BEST remembered today for their rousing patriotic fight songs, the pluggers also cranked out plenty of sad World War I tunes, with titles like “He Sleeps Beneath the Soil of France” and lots of talk of kissing Mother’s sweet lips one last time. As far as I’m concerned, though, none of them come close, in the matter of pathos, to a song by Bud de Sylva, Gus Kahn, and Albert Gumble that wasn’t actually supposed to be sad at all. “Give a Little Credit to the Navy” is dedicated to a dignified-looking gentleman named William Buel Franklin, USNRF, commander of the US Naval Training Camp in Pelham Bay Park, New York—quite possibly the last man with such a resplendent monicker to tread upon the fair soil of the Bronx; its chorus goes:
Give a little credit to the Navy,
We took the boys across
without a single loss.
Ev’ry soldier is a fighting bear,
but don’t forget it,
give us credit,
we took ’em over there.
Mothers of soldiers, sweethearts and wives,
we’ll take care of your boys, though it costs us our lives.
So give a little credit to the Navy,
the Navy will do its share.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 16