Surprise of the Century : Oldest Segment of U.S. Society Is Also the Fastest-Growing

They used to be curiosities.

The Social Security Administration would send field agents to interview them on their magic birthday. And anyone who reached age 100 was pretty much guaranteed a story in the local newspaper.

Guess what? It isn’t news anymore. What is occurring instead is an emerging trend--the oldest portion of the population is now the fastest growing.

Consider this, from the U.S. Bureau of the Census:

- In 1980, the number of centenarians in the United States was about 15,000.

- By 1985, they numbered 25,000.

- By the turn of the century, fewer than a dozen years away, they are expected to number about 100,000.

Locally, such is the growth of this army that a unique nonprofit group has been founded in Burbank--the American Centenarian Committee--which, among other things, keeps under its wing 57 such residents in the Los Angeles area.

One of them, 103-year-old Percy Washington of Los Angeles, has it all figured out: “The only way to live is long!”

And, according to a special census report, the main place to do it in is California.

Bureau of the Census figures from the 1980 count, with later figures supplied by the Social Security Administration, show that no fewer than 2,155 centenarians live here. Other states with large numbers of centenarians include New York, 1,539; Texas, 1,324; Pennsylvania, 1,082 and Ohio, 953. The state with the second lowest total of centenarians was Nevada, 19. The fewest number of them--9--live in Alaska.

“For those born in 1879, the odds against living 100 years were 400-to-1,” the census report added. “The odds of people born in 1980 . . . are 87-to-1.

“Such large improvements suggest that the elderly population is itself aging.”

So the age-old question--what’s the common thread?--now takes on new meaning.

One thing is clear: Until this decade, there weren’t that many centenarians, so there has been little formal study of them as a group.

In Lexington, Ky., Lisa Burgess, a research assistant at the Sanders-Brown Research Center on Aging, has been part of an ongoing study under way in conjunction with the University of Kentucky Medical Center. Since last September, she said by phone, the mission has been: “To find out, in part, what makes centenarians tick.”

Of the 30 she has interviewed so far in Kentucky, she has reached this conclusion: “With most of them, it is a matter of keeping busy.”

More clues can be gleaned from the Social Security Administration practice from 1963 to 1972 of visiting every person who turned 100. Over the years, those 1,127 Social Security interviews became dusty bureaucratic esoterica, until an enterprising author, Osborn Segerberg Jr., went to great lengths to track down the by-then elusive volumes, added obituaries and interviews of his own, until he had 1,200 centenarians on which to base some conclusions.

“Living to Be 100” (Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1982) sheds as much light as anything on these remarkable people.

‘No Scientific Formula’

“Each one is a pioneer, an experimenter, in an area that science does not fully comprehend,” Segerberg wrote. “There is no scientific formula for living 100 years. Instead, each centenarian had to make individual decisions and find personal solutions while advancing through the maze of living.”

Dr. Richard Suzman is a health science administrator with the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md., whose group contracted for the Bureau of the Census special report.

“In the past, a likely limit for human life expectancy was 85,” he said. “But I was recently at a UC Berkeley conference on aging, and most of the people there felt that the limit will be exceeded in the intermediate future.

“Some of the delegates felt that right now people could theoretically be living live much longer than they do.”

In all too many cases, however, those who do live on “not only outlive their spouses, they outlive their assets,” Suzman pointed out.

“Poverty rates are much higher in the oldest old, not only because of outliving their assets, but because they started retirement with lower levels of assets and pensions. In fact, very few have private pensions.”

“The trouble is that our society simply doesn’t know what to do about the very old,” Vern L. Bengtson, director of the USC Gerontology Research Center, said. “They are still regarded as an aberration.”

The idea for the American Centenarian Committee was born at a convalescent home birthday party for three who had made it.

Sharing a glass of fortified milk with Percy Washington, committee co-founder Raphael O. Cordero II lent an ear as the centenarian in a wheelchair, dressed as if he had just been to a power lunch, regaled still another audience in his room at the Sparr Convalescent Hospital here with tales of yesteryear, of yestercentury:

“I used to raise cotton by working a plow pulled by a mule. During Prohibition, we would mix shoe polish with water and drink it like alcohol. Tasted worse than turpentine. And we would smoke horse hair and corn silk.”

Seated in a wheelchair under a mulberry tree outside the Sylmar travel trailer where she lives by herself, 102-year-old Karen Carter was much more subdued, describing how she spends hours daily strengthening her body and mind by reading her Bible.

“If somebody gives you a cussing, pray for that person,” Carter said. “That releases both you and him.”

Yogurt and Walking

And in the Hollywood house where Setrak Boyajian lives with a housekeeper, the 103-year-old man sat at a dining room table and described the roles that yogurt and lots of walking play in his life:

“For about 75 years now, I have made a gallon of yogurt each week. I do it all by hand, and my finger is my thermometer. I drink yogurt throughout the day. It strengthens your bones and helps you sleep at night.”

Additionally, the Turkish-born Boyajian takes a daily walk of about 20 blocks in his neighborhood after breakfast and walks another 20 blocks after dinner. One time, he said, he had to use his cane to fend off a man who appeared to be after his money. Having won the confrontation, the stroller relented and handed over a few coins.

These three, plus 54 others, come under the wing of the 36-year-old Cordero, and the committee co-founder, Jean Priestman. She is administrator of the Santa Clarita Convalescent Hospital in Newhall. He is a free-lance computer programmer, who gave up full-time work in favor of spending more time to see that the old-timers are visited, phoned and honored when possible.

If only for their wisdom:

Washington: “If you get to thinking too much about your age, you’re going to die.”

Carter: “I read a newspaper every day. Don’t go to bed ignorant.”

Boyajian: “Never worry. When the worst is over, you’ll see that worrying didn’t change the outcome of anything.”

Washington, born in Louisiana, has been married twice but has no children.

His routine in the convalescent hospital is to get up at 6 a.m., eat two bowls of corn flakes for breakfast, plus toast, then dress in either his light or dark blue sweater, and maneuver himself into the hallway to listen to jazz on his Walkman radio, slapping his wheelchair with his hand. He eats a full lunch every day, and spends his afternoons again with his radio, has a sandwich for supper, and is asleep by about 7:30 p.m.

Carter, who was born in Missouri, recalled going with her family in an oxen-pulled covered wagon to Oklahoma, where her father farmed a homestead. She never got beyond the third grade. “We moved to Colorado, and I had to earn my board and clothes by cooking and cleaning for railroad section men.”

Married Three Times

Carter said she had been married three times, and has an undisclosed number of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Nowadays, she usually rises around 7 a.m. and cooks oatmeal for herself. She makes a full lunch, usually chicken or roast beef, and has a light meal for supper “because you won’t be exercising to burn off what you have eaten.”

The devout Carter spends her daytime hours watching religious programs on TV and taking phone calls from people who want her to pray for them. She also spends time among the ferns and bougainvillaea in the garden outside her trailer.

Bedtime is around 7 p.m., sometimes later if there is news she wants to hear about.

An Annual Ritual

And once a year, as she has all her life, the 5-foot-7 centenarian follows a ritual:

“I have never had my hair cut in my life. Instead, I do something I learned as a child from Indians in the Oklahoma Territory. My hair grows until it is down near my knees. Every January, on the new of the moon, I wrap a wet washrag around my hand, light a match, and burn off about 8 inches of hair. I wash my hair, dry it out in the sun, and put it back up in a bun.”

When Boyajian came to the United States at age 21, he worked for 75 cents a day repairing Oriental rugs in Chicago. He eventually owned his own rug business, lost all to gangsters, managed to start again and lost all he had saved in the 1929 stock market crash.

The next year, $500 to his name, he moved to Pasadena, where he started a dry cleaning business, which he ran until he was 75. “When I reached 70, I started thinking about the cemetery,” he said. “When I passed 80, I stopped thinking about death.”

Boyajian, who was married for 70 years, said he has three children, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. His day consists of getting up at about 5 a.m., having soft-boiled eggs and oatmeal for breakfast, taking his walk, watering the lawn, sometimes playing backgammon with an 85-year-old friend, and reading everything he can get his hands on.

His big meal of the day is lunch, perhaps stew or rice pilaf, and for supper he dines lightly on meat and vegetables. Bedtime is around 10 p.m.

When August G. Erickson of Springfield, Minn., turned 100, he was asked why he had lived that long.

His reply: “Because I didn’t die.”

One woman, asked how it felt to be 100, responded: “I don’t know yet. This is my first time.”

Bengtson, the USC Gerontology Research Center director and a sociology professor, got interested in gerontology partly because of his wife’s grandfather, who lived to be 106: “One of the things I learned from him is that you can make a career out of aging. He was so active that at age 102 he suffered a broken leg after falling from a ladder while cleaning the gutters in his daughter’s Arcadia home.

“I see the very old as pioneers in time. Never before have so many of them lived so long. Their longevity has outpaced our societal mechanisms. We don’t have the expectations and roles that might be appropriate to them, aside from the sick role that is usually assigned to them, which isn’t necessarily the case.”

Not a Homogeneous Group

Bob Harootyan, head of “New Roles in Society,” a program of the American Assn. of Retired Persons in Washington, had this thought:

“The increasing numbers of centenarians may stop those who think of the elderly as one homogeneous group. People in the 35 years from ages 65 to 100 are lumped into one group, and yet we wouldn’t assign such a group identity to people ages 25 to 60.”

Bengtson said he believes it would be useful to divide the elderly into three groups:

- The young old, ages 60 to 75.

- The middle old, ages 76 to 90.

- The very old, ages 91 and older.

Centenarians, Harootyan added, “are special old people--they are survivors. They haven’t been fully studied enough, although some experts think there may be something in their biological systems which has allowed them to survive the potential death-dealing diseases.”

While there appears to be no formula, author Segerberg said that one possible common thread emerged from the codifying he did of answers to the Social Security questionnaires, and obituaries, and his own interviews:

“I see centenarians as strong-willed people,” he said from his home in Kinderhook, N. Y. “Not in the Nietzschean sense of bossing, but in a sense of persevering and of being independent in controlling their own affairs.”

The people he studied (comprising 637 men and 563 women) provided these insights:

- Most of those he studied had a discernible pattern of orderliness in their lives, much of it the result of having been associated with farm life. “Farming imposes order,” he said. “And when they were young, we were an agricultural nation.”

- Slightly more than a half of the centenarians were associated with a religious life.

- There is no known set of “longevity genes.” A genetic factor was judged to be salient characteristic associated with longevity in only 7.5% of the cohort. “There is a saying in gerontology that nature deals the cards, but the individual plays the hand.”

- For whatever it is worth, the Zodiac signs that produced the highest percentage of 100-year-olds were: For males, Capricorn, 10%; females, Pisces, 11%. And the lowest percentage were: For males, Scorpio, 6%; females, Gemini, 6%.

Laughter a Factor

The ability to laugh may also be a factor. The most common phrase used by the Social Security questioners of centenarians was that he or she “is very alert and has a keen sense of humor.” This trait, Segerberg said, was evident in at least 1-of-6.

Being able to laugh was mentioned by Dr. Gary Small, assistant professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and an authority on aging: “One of my observations of very old people is that they seem to have a sense of humor. It makes me wonder whether being able to see the lighter side of life protects us in some way.”

Small continued: “We are in awe of centenarians. . . . They have conquered this thing we know of as mortality. They have tapped into the fantasy we have to become immortal.”