I went to a birthday party the other day for someone who has lived through the flu pandemic of 1918, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the nuclear jitters of the Cold War and the disastrous first four months of Donald Trump.
Alma Balter, at age 100, takes in that century of life with a shrug and looks around the table at who’s not going to finish their dessert. She is no fickle eater. When we go out to dinner, everyone else orders a light pasta or just a salad.
“I’ll have the porterhouse,” she says. That is, if the ribs aren’t available. I’ve seen a hefty slab, smothered in barbecue sauce, disappear at her end as if she were hosting a conqueror’s feast in Game of Thrones. The waiter usually pauses. The smaller portion, ma’am?
“No, the 12-ouncer is fine.”
Alma is one of more than 70,000 people in the United States who are alive today having made it to triple digits—a growing demographic. She shares an apartment complex, and many a meal, with Holocaust survivors, widows of Nazi-killing war heroes and people who knew Jackie Robinson when he played four sports at UCLA, a few blocks from her home in Westwood. At present, her health is fine, as is the aforementioned appetite.
When you go to a 100th birthday party—my first—people always want to know the secret to long life. Last month, Emma Morano died at the age of 117 at her home in Italy. She was, for a time, the world’s oldest human. Her secret was not something cardiologists would recommend: She ate three eggs a day, two of them raw, and was a regular consumer of hazelnut cookies chased by home-spiked grappa. The drink, for those who’ve never been in a road emergency on the Italian autostrada, might work as fuel for your Fiat in a pinch.
Given that you can break the rules of health obsessives and still live longer than friends who eat like squirrels, I’m more interested in the time that these folks have passed, rather than how they got there.
Alma was born during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, the same year and month that John F. Kennedy came into the world. One in 10 U.S. babies would not live to see their first birthday. Life expectancy at birth was 54.
The first miracle of her life was surviving to the age of 2 during the flu pandemic.
During the Great Depression, when one in four U.S. adults were out of work and many homes still did not have indoor plumbing, the birthrate plummeted, as did hope. And then came World War II, which killed upward of 60 million people—about 3 percent of the global population.
On her birthday, Alma noted that one of her relatives lived to be 106, implying that many more helpings of thick beef slabs and whiskey sours at happy hour were ahead. She told a joke about a man who made a scratchy sound by rubbing two fingers together, as a way to keep the elephants away. No, he was told—you’re crazy! Why keep doing it?
“It’s worked so far.”