Oldest Woman Passes

Elizabeth Bolden, recognized by Guiness (and others) as the oldest person alive, passed away on Monday, Dec. 12, 2006. She was born August 15, 1890, which made her 116 years old. According to her family members, she had:

• 40 grandchildren
• 75 great-grandchildren
• 150 great-great-grandchildren
• 220 great-great-great grandchildren
• 75 great-great-great-great grandchildren

My last grandparent passed away over 10 years ago.

Is there another term for great-great-great grandchildren? I mean, instead of saying "a thousand-thousand-thousand bytes", we say "gigabyte". So how come there isn't something like a "giga-grandchild"? "Kilo-grandchild" and "tera-grandchild" sounds like just a couple of more mindless homicidal video games, and "mega-grandchild" sounds like something that teamed up with Mothra to fight Godzilla, so we might have to work on the wording a little.

Since I read about this lady, I've been thinking about all that has happened during her lifetime. When she was born, Civil War vets were younger than Vietnam vets are now, "horseless carriages" were the focus of hobbyists and inventors, balloons were the only things that men flew in, the phonograph and electric light were novelties, and the last free Indian tribes were being moved into reservations. And I've been calculating her age when certain recent historic (trivial and non-trivial) events come up. For example, she was:

• 13 when the Wright brothers first flew,
• 23 when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated,
• 39 when the stock market crashed,
• 51 when Pearl Harbor was attacked,
• 67 when Sputnik first flew,
• 75 when Charlie Brown's Christmas special first aired,
• 79 when Armstrong and Aldrin ventured out of the Eagle,
• 85 when SNL premiered,
• 94 when Miami Vice premiered,
• 100 a few days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and
• 111 a few days before a plane crashed short of the Pentagon.

When my paternal grandmother became 90 years of age in the early 1990s, one of the family members called the local paper to have it mentioned. Even back then, achieving that age wasn't unique enough to be worth mentioning along with the cat that got stuck in the tree, and Daisy-Mae's bridge club announcements. With improved nutrition (well, for those of us who even consider how well we eat), and incredible advancements in healthcare, I expect that most of my generation will live to see 100, and we should also be active and self-sufficient for longer too.

Speaking of improving nutrition and quality of life, I was watching an episode of "Battlefield Detectives" on Custer's last stand recently. One thing they pointed out was how the US Cavalry men were undernourished and in bad physical shape. Inspecting their skeletal remains, they were able to determine that these men in their early 20s had rotting teeth, arthritis, and their backs were in horrible condition from all of the horse riding. That was one harsh life. But that's how things were for a Cavalry soldier around the time Elizabeth Bolden was born.

---jps