World's Oldest Person Dies, But What a Life

Kane Tanaka

The world’s oldest person died last week, Kane Tanaka of Japan  had reached the ripe old age of 119. She was born on January 2, 1903, ten months before the Wright brothers first manned flight and a few months before construction began on the Panama Canal and six months before the first modern Olympic Games were held. She was born in the same year as Joan Crawford, Johnny Weismuller, Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Pretty Boy Floyd, Robert Oppenheimer, and Dr. Seuess, all of whom pre-deceased her by at least thirty-eight years. The year she was born Adolph Hitler was a teenager, Franklin Roosevelt was twenty-one. Zelda Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart were toddlers. Women did not have the vote. Theodore Roosevelt was in his first term as United States president. 

Ms. Tanaka was nine years old when the Titanic hit an iceberg. She was eleven when World War I started. During her teens that war ended and there was a revolution in Russia. Not only was Babe Ruth still playing when she was a teen, he was still a pitcher and played for the Boston Red Sox. Also during her teens King Tut’s tomb was discovered, prohibition went into effect in the U.S., the NFL and ACLU were founded, Charlie Chaplin’s first feature, The Kid, was released, Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty, radio broadcasts began.

When young, Ms. Tanaka could have conversed with American Civil War veterans who were still only in their seventies and Native American survivors of the Battle of Little Big Horn (aka Custer’s Last Stand) who were in their sixties.

She was twenty-three when Queen Elizabeth II was born — plenty old enough to be her mother. In fact she was old enough to have given birth to Betty Friedan, Rodney Dangerfield, Mickey Rooney, Ray Bradbury, Charlie Parker, Judy Garland, Betty White, Anne Frank and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

If she’d been a U.S. citizen she could have voted for Calvin Coolidge in the 1924 presidential election — or his Democratic opponent, John Davis. Then again she could have voted for Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette — I would have.

If her memory was in tact in her last days, she would have remembered the Roaring Twenties, the publication of The Great Gatsby, the Great Depression and the Reichstag Fire. 

By the time World War II ended she was already forty-two. When she turned sixty-five and became a senior citizen, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were still alive, the war in Vietnam was still raging and the Watergate scandal was still over four years away. (She was already seventy-one when Nixon resigned as a consequence of that scandal.)

Ms. Tanaka turned 100 before the U.S. invasion of Iraq and five years before Barack Obama was elected president.

This remarkable woman was around for a lot of human history, from the first flight, to the moon landing from the birth of the Model T, to the electric car. The entire existence of the USSR was within her lifetime, including the fourteen years before it came into being and the thirty years since its dissolution. Within her lifetime there was Russia's war with Japan and their invasion of the Ukraine with two World Wars in between as well as numerous civil wars, violent revolutions and "police actions." Virtually the entire history of the cinema has been within her lifetime, as well as all of television's history and the coming of the World Wide Web.

Ms. Tanaka is officially the second oldest person ever, trailing only Jeanne Calment who lived to the age of 122 -- from 1875 to 1997. I intend to give them both a run for their money.