When it comes to aging, long live the snuff

A few days before he celebrated his 99th birthday, I asked Judge William Augustus “Gus” Bootle his secret to longevity.

He looked up from his morning newspaper and chuckled.

“Marry the right girl and learn to stay on her good side,” he said.

He was 102 when he died 20 years ago next week – on Jan. 25, 2005. He and his wife, Virginia, were married for 75 years.

The United States District judge was a champion of civil rights and was voted Macon’s “Person of the Century” in a poll of newspaper readers. He ordered the integration of the University of Georgia in 1961 and ended segregation in the Bibb County schools in 1970.

Although he was a giant in the community, only about 200 people could attend his funeral service because of icy conditions in Macon, lending truth to the adage “no matter how rich famous or powerful you are, the size of your funeral will still depend on the weather.’’

I think about Judge Bootle often, especially when I drive past the federal courthouse that bears his name. I thought about him again in recent weeks following the death of former President Jimmy Carter. 

Carter lived to be 100, longer than any U.S. president. He was married to Rosalynn for 77 years, longer than any couple in presidential history.

Don’t look now, but the number of centenarians in the U.S. has nearly tripled over the past three decades. 

According to the Census Bureau, there were 37,000 centenarians in 1990. Last year, there were an estimated 101,000 (1,376 in Georgia) and that number is projected to more than quadruple to 422,000 over the next 30 years.

 A century ago, only one in 100,000 people lived to see their 100th birthday. It has become so commonplace in our times that Hallmark now offers a line of birthday cards for centenarians. (A friend in the neighborhood recently hosted a 100th birthday party for her mother. No word on whether there was valet parking for all the walkers.)

We would be wise to prepare for a geriatric tidal wave of epic proportions. The two largest generations in American history are coming down the track. There are 72.7 million millennials (born 1981-96) and 71.6 million baby boomers (born 1946-64) who are aspiring candidates for triple digits.

The secret to that many rings on the tree? It’s anybody’s guess. Good genes, medical advances and healthy lifestyles are certainly part of the equation. A friend once told me he asked a wise old man the key to living long. Walk a mile and eat a bowl of oatmeal every morning, the old man told him. (I can handle all those steps, but oatmeal is an acquired taste.)

Judge Bootle and President Carter were among the many folks I’ve encountered over the years who have lived to the ripe old age of 100 or more.

Margaret Sammons, who lived in Hillsboro, touched life across three different centuries and was still going to the beauty parlor every Friday at the age of 106. She didn’t own a store-bought dress until she went to college at Wesleyan and never uttered a word of profanity in her life. 

 Nettie Tanner, of Macon, was still reciting poetry at 105. Her daughter couldn’t get her to eat her vegetables, but you can’t get children to eat their vegetables, either. Besides, the state of Alabama must have thought she was a child. The family was once notified that Tanner would need to see a pediatrician to get her immunizations. That’s because the computer listed her date of birth as 1-29-94 … only the 94 was supposed to be 1894, not 1994.

Lucille Whittington, who lived to be 104, had a similar computer glitch when she went to get her driver’s license renewed in 1998, the year she became a centenarian. When her date of birth (8-1-98) was entered into the system, it said she hadn’t been born. It was supposed to be 1898, of course. Whittington had been driving since she was a youngster living in Houston County, where her father owned one of the first automobiles in Middle Georgia.

Annie Williams was 107 when I sat across from her and learned she had never lived far from the Macon neighborhood on Felton Lane where she was brought into the world. She was the first black woman to be hired at Robins Air Force Base in 1942. She told me she had a great-grandmother who lived to be 115.

Helen Matthews was a young-at-heart 102 when I met her in the spring of 2004.  She was the oldest living member at Mulberry United Methodist, making her the matriarch of the mother of all Methodist churches in Georgia. She and 240 other centenarians across the state were asked to take part in a study on aging by the University of Georgia’s Gerontology Center.

Lula Gilbert was 112 and the third-oldest person in Georgia when she died in Macon in 2012. At the time, she was one of a dozen supercentenarians (110 or older) in the U.S. and one of about 30 in the world. She was born before airplanes, air-conditioning and President Lincoln made his debut on the head of a penny. 

I first met Gilbert in 2010, a few days before her 110th birthday. She holds the record as the oldest human being I have ever interviewed in the living room of a double-wide trailer. She was the daughter of a sharecropper and married when she was 13. She enjoyed watching Westerns on TV every afternoon.

After driving almost two hours to Davisboro, I couldn’t get much information out of her during the interview. I was struggling to come up with questions to ask her when I noticed her pocketbook on the coffee table.

I didn’t want to pry, but I was curious … and desperate for a story angle.  

What does a great, great, great-grandmother carry in her purse? 

She began emptying it, one item at a time.

A hairbrush. A chicken bone. 

And three cans of snuff … her great-grandson told me she mixed  her own blend.

Maybe snuff is the secret to longevity, too.

Long live snuff.

Ed Grisamore has been telling stories in Macon and Middle Georgia for more than 45 years. He is the author of nine books.