This past March 6th former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan turned 100 years old. Nineteen days later, frizzy-haired film critic Gene Shalit did the same. And if he stays extant for another month, comedian/writer/director/actor/producer Mel Brooks will join them in the centenarian club on June 28th. Completing ten decades of life is particularly remarkable for those born in 1926, since life expectancy for Americans born that year was just 56.7 years, per historical life tables published by the Social Security Administration.
According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 108,000 centenarians were living in the United States in 2024. That was second to Japan, home to an estimated 146,000 one-hundred-plussers. But even with ongoing advances in medicine, science, and nutrition, surviving ten decades is still no easy feat. The last time someone counted, people aged 100 or more comprised just .03 percent of America’s population. The next three nations in the century-old citizens standings are China (60,000), India (48,000) and Thailand (38,000).
Statistically the one-hundred-plus population is growing. United Nations projections indicate America’s total of hundred-year-olds will quadruple by the year 2054, to over 500,000, although by that time China’s centenarian count will have surpassed ours. Earth’s true longevity leader, though, is Thailand. If predictive data is correct, there will be 49 centenarians per 10,000 people there in 2054. China’s world-pacing 767,000 old-timers will represent a mere six people per 10,000 there.
Basic math indicates that if the above figures are correct, 99.7 percent of those born in 1926 aren’t around to celebrate their personal centennial this year.
Distinguished people born that year no longer available to blow out 100 candles include Soupy Sales, Leslie Nielsen, Joe Garagiola, Pete Rozelle, Ralph Abernathy, Jerry Lewis, Gus Grissom, Hugh Hefner, Queen Elizabeth II, Harper Lee, Cloris Leachman, Don Rickles, Miles Davis, Fidel Castro, Christine Jorgensen, Andy Griffith, Tony Bennett, Donn Fendler, Anne Jackson, Fidel Castro, Emile Francis, Dr. Bob Richards, Duke Snider, John Coltrane, Chuck Berry, Y. A. Tittle, and Joe Paterno. But maybe the most impactful now-deceased person born in 1926 was Vasily Arkhipov, the Soviet submarine officer who refused an order to launch a nuclear torpedo at US Naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Were it not for his action (or more accurately, his courageous inaction), it’s possible no one would be around to celebrate a birthday this year.
Marilyn Monroe would have turned 100 this week. Frozen in America’s collective mind as the glamorous but tragic Hollywood sex symbol who died at 36 in 1962, she’s not the only one seen in a perpetually attractive light due at least in part to a premature demise. Who knows how an increasingly aggressive inquisitive media (not to mention the scandal-hungry, celebrity-obsessed consumers of their digging) would have impacted the memories of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had any of them lived to a ripe old age. Imagine either Kennedy living past 100, or Dr. King at 97, the age he’d be if he were still alive today.
Speaking of difficult to picture, remember Samantha Smith, the ten-year-old Mainer who wrote Soviet leader Yuri Andropov a letter in 1982, subsequently accepted the Communist party’s general secretary’s invitation to come for a visit, was subsequently recognized as the world’s youngest peace activist, and died in a tragic plane crash less than three years later?
She’d have turned 54 this year, the day after Mel Brooks turns 100.
There are, it seems, some advantages to dying young.
But that’s easy to say for those of us who are ineligible to do so, and have been for quite some time.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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