Video: life lessons from a 111 year old WWII veteran

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/10/video-life-lessons-from-a-111.html

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Thanks for sharing. Inspirational.

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Anything in there about recognizing the signs of impending global fascism, and/or the ethics of punching nazis?

asking for a friend…

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Try Harry Leslie Smith for that.

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I think at least some of that boils down to reducing your stress load, by a lot.

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Aka: How to be a bad ass. Kudos to this gentleman for living a long life, and most of all i am thankful for his service. Will check out the video when i got a free moment from work :slight_smile:

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Yup. He still has it. His twittering is very good too.

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Age like this all comes down to luck. The pathology of death has never changed (go look at old cemeteries):

  • 15-25 male: accident, female: childbirth
  • 40-65 cancer or heart failure

If you don’t get cancer or some form of heart failure by the time you’re 65, or aren’t already dead from adolescence you live forever (read super old) like this guy.

All tips for living to old ages like this are nice thoughts and are relatively good advice but are largely statistical insignificant.

Luck is all there is.

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“When it’s your time to go, you go’na go”

Roger That!

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For a long life, have good genes. I think it’s a message we can all take to heart and try to emulate.

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Good to know that you can swap out gin for whiskey in the George Burns Longevity Diet.

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exactly. most centenarians seem to agree – it’s the lack of stress.

All the really old ones seem to be smokers…the the old adage almost says:

“what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but it usually kills you, unless you are super lucky, and even then.”

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I met two Code Talkers in a restaurant in Old Town Albuquerque a few years ago. One of 'em turned out to be Chester Nez. My wife goaded me into saying something, and I think I mumbled through some “thank yous” and got to shake each of their hands. As I was paying, their handler came up and thanked me for approaching. “They don’t say much, but they’re really tickled when someone recognizes them.”

The year Chester died, the Gallup Independence Day Parade ran the USMC Code Talkers float up Route 66, just as usual.

It was empty.

Stop and talk to our Veterans. Too quickly will come a time we won’t have that luxury.

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What a mensch. I want his truck so bad.

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Back in the late 80s/early 90s I worked in the Pentagon with an old black WWII vet. Between starting as a civilian, getting drafted, coming home after the war and working as a civilian, he put in 50 years of government service.

I worked on the SpaceLab Project at ESA in the early 80s. It was a NASA program, so they sent people from Houston to oversee. A bunch of them were WWII vets who were about to retire. The thing is, they planned to retire to Germany because they were veterans of the German side; they had been at Peenemünde and were brought to the States along with Von Braun to continue building rockets.

They were absolutely fascinating to talk to, both about their work on V1s and V2s during the war and in the early days of getting NASA going. I never really saw them as “the enemy” despite the huge damage and deaths their missiles caused during the war. (And I was living in Antwerp, one of their main targets.) Those particular guys also had a lot to do with getting us to the Moon.

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Probably some element of selection bias there since anyone over 100 today came into adulthood during a time when most Americans smoked.

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112 years and 57 days, according to the wiki.

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Wasn’t this gentleman recently the victim of fraud? Thought i read that the oldest person in the US had their bank account emptied and the bank was recently able to reverse it. Let me check…

Edit: Oh snap it is, and this gentleman lives in Austin

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