From Jim Crow to Barack Obama

"Mother" Gertrude Baines, 1894 - 2009.

9/11 took on additional sadness for our family last year when a woman we held dear passed away. Today I would like to take a final look back at an extraordinary life.

A year ago this weekend, Gertrude Baines, a woman who had been alive since Grover Cleveland’s second administration, passed away in her sleep in an L.A. convalescent home at the age of 115 years, 158 days. For most of 2009 she had been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s oldest person.

A few days later, my wife Kimi and I were honored to be among the fifty friends gathered at a mortuary in South L.A. to say goodbye to the woman we knew as “Mother Baines.”

Mother Baines was born in Georgia to parents who were former slaves on April 6, 1894, less than thirty years after the close of the Civil War. In the year she was born Utah became the 45^th state and Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the first time.

She was five when the twentieth century began, nine when the Wright Brothers first flew, and 10 when Einstein gave the equation E=mc² to the world. She was a young woman of 23 when America entered World War I, and was 25-years-old when women were first allowed to vote. Around this time she got married and had a daughter.

Seven years later, “talkies” were first heard in theaters. She was 35 when the stock market crashed in 1929, and a decade older than that when Gone With the Wind had its premiere. It was during this period that her daughter died of typhoid and her marriage ended in divorce.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor when she was 46, and she celebrated her 50^th birthday a couple of months before D-Day. Six years later she would have heard the first reports of a new war in Korea, and although she didn’t realize it at the time, her life was near its mid-point when the conflict ended three years later.

During the decade of her sixties, Elvis hit the scene, James Dean died in a car crash, and Sputnik launched the Space Age. At some point, she migrated north and became a maid at Ohio State University where she retired when she turned 65 in 1959.

Mother Baines was only a couple of months shy of her 70^th birthday when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. During this decade she also witnessed the height of the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.

Watergate claimed Nixon’s presidency when she was 80. The Vietnam War ended the following year, and Ronald Reagan, who was nearly seventeen years her junior, was inaugurated when she was 86.

During her nineties, the Cold War ended and the first Gulf War was launched. During Bill Clinton’s first term, she turned 100-years-old. She was 107 at the time of the 9/11 attacks and would live for exactly eight more years into one additional presidential administration (her twenty-first!).

As a one-degree separation from slavery, she was our last link to that sad era in our nation’s history. She survived just long enough to get the last laugh on bigotry by seeing a black man elected to our nation’s highest office.

Mother Baines’ longevity can’t be taught – it’s either in the DNA or it isn’t. What can be learned is to approach a life, of whatever length, with the patience, courage, and dignity that she brought to hers.

Hitting the Genetic Jackpot

I awoke to the news yesterday that George Steinbrenner, the fiery owner of the New York Yankees, had died overnight after suffering a massive heart attack a week past his 80^th birthday.

My initial thought was about the legacy he leaves behind as a driven man who demanded winning at all costs. But then I wondered, “How the hell does a type-A person like George Steinbrenner live to be 80?”

It really doesn’t make sense until you figure in genetics. Henry Steinbrenner, George’s equally driven father (who was apparently as hard on his son as his son was on his managers), lived to be 79.

As I’ve written previously, Kimi and I had the great honor of meeting 115-year-old Mother Gertrude Baines last year. We attended her 115^th birthday party in April where she was certified by Guinness as the oldest person on Earth. Sadly, we also attended her funeral in September.

I think a moment we will both treasure forever will be the phone call we received from her the morning after her party when she thanked Kimi for the sweater she bought her for her birthday.

I’m pretty sure that unless I become the guy Guinness sends around to certify the ages of super-centenarians (those who have lived past 110), I will never meet anyone older than Mother Baines. But there is a chance it could happen if I go to the former Soviet republic of Georgia where reports have surfaced recently about a woman who may have just turned 130!

130-year-old woman

Antisa Khvichava lives in a small mountainous village with her 40-year-old grandson. She is in remarkable health, both mentally and physically, for a bristlecone pine of a person. She is missing a birth certificate, which was lost during one of the political upheavals that she has survived, but dozens of friends and family members back up her claim that she was born in 1880! If Guinness believes her, she will become the oldest certified person ever.

While George Steinbrenner’s genes were good, it’s lucky for Yankee managers of the next several decades that his DNA code didn’t compare to either Ms. Khvichava or Mother Baines.