At 102, It’s High Time to Take the Oath

After nearly four decades in the United States, Kazimieras Bandzevicius decided he had enough time on his hands to become an American citizen. On Monday, he took the oath of allegiance--at age 102.

Officials from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service believe Bandzevicius, a native of Lithuania who immigrated to the United States in 1950, is the oldest person ever naturalized in Los Angeles. But because of the way statistics are kept, officials say they do not know whether he is the oldest ever naturalized in the United States.

The Hollywood resident grinned as he walked slowly down the halls of the U.S. District Courthouse in Los Angeles on Monday. One hand held a wooden cane and the other clung to the arm of his granddaughter, Olga Goodman of Beverly Hills. A small American flag stuck out of his vest pocket.

He had just left the chambers of U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr., where he and a 10-year-old boy from the Philippines, John Michael Cruz Cortes, pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Hatter administered the oath to them in chambers, ahead of the 34 others who later took the oath as a group in the courtroom because of the media attention shown Bandzevicius, court officials said. The boy, son of U.S. District Court Deputy Clerk Jose Cortes, was added to the private ceremony because he was the youngest in the group.

“It’s never too late to become a citizen of this great nation, and it’s certainly never too soon,” Hatter said as he congratulated both.

“I feel like a newly born little baby,” Bandzevicius said in Russian, with Goodman translating.

“I feel really good, and I’m planning to live a long time,” added Bandzevicius, his gray hair framing a bald pate and his blue eyes shining behind thick-lensed glasses.

Why had he waited so long to apply for citizenship?

“I worked so hard it seemed like there was no time,” he said. “Now there is time, and I want to help the Republican Party.”

After Bandzevicius came to America at age 63, he said, he worked as a machinist for various companies and did not retire until he was 92. “He wouldn’t have retired then,” Goodman said, “except that he had to have cataract surgery.”

Not long after that, his wife died, and he developed various circulatory ailments. After he had vascular surgery on one leg late last year, Goodman said he told her, “ ‘I want to die an American.’ ”

His attorney, Kaye Evans, said he passed his oral and written examination April 12, his 102nd birthday.

For his family, which includes his two daughters, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild, the citizenship effort was the latest in a lifelong pattern of strength and determination, Goodman said.

Bandzevicius was born in a family of 12 children in 1887 in rural Lithuania, then under the control of czarist Russia. He wanted to be a pharmacist, he said, because “in a rural town if you were a pharmacist you were a big person.”

But since his family did not have money for his education, he struck out on his own at age 13. Eventually he made his way to what was then called St. Petersburg, now Leningrad. There, he stayed with Roman Catholic priests, and through scholarships and tutoring jobs he eventually graduated--with honors, Goodman said--from the University of St. Petersburg.

But he never became a pharmacist because the Russian Revolution broke out and changed his life. A friend of his was executed by the Bolsheviks. Bandzevicius promised this friend, who was actually Goodman’s grandfather, that he would care for the man’s wife and children. He married the widow in 1920, adopted the children and took them to Lithuania, believing life would be safer for them there.

There, he worked as both a banker and as a Buick car dealer. But in 1940 he moved the family to Germany, Goodman said, because of the impending Soviet occupation of Lithuania. In 1950 he moved to Chicago and then Los Angeles.

“I love the freedom,” Bandzevicius said when asked what he liked best about the United States.

Bandzevicius, who lives in a two-story Hollywood house, still takes care of himself.

“He did his own taxes this year. He calls me up to tell me when he wants to move his money to another account for interest,” Goodman said. But, she added, “the family cooks for him.”

“I wanted him to wear new clothes for today,” Goodman said, looking at the outfit Bandzevicius had chosen for the day-- a jacket, tie, vest, trousers and shoes, all in brown, with white socks. “But he said, ‘I’m an old man. I’ll wear my old outfit.’ ”