Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 22, 1995 TAG: 9502230011
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ARLES, FRANCE LENGTH: Medium
The photographers jostled as though a Hollywood movie star were in the room. But they were taking aim at Jeanne Calment, unruffled by all the hoopla as she turned 120 - the oldest person in the world.
Nearly blind, Calment has been living since 1985 at a nursing home that has been renamed after her. She has used a wheelchair since fracturing her leg and elbow in a fall in 1990.
The Guinness Book of Records lists her as the oldest person in the world whose age can be authenticated. In seven months, 22 days, she would surpass Shigechiyo Izumi - a Japanese man who died in 1986 - as the oldest person of all time with a verifiable birth date.
Calment still lives in the southern city of Arles, where she was born in 1875. She outlasted her husband, brother, a daughter who died of pleurisy and a grandson who died in a car crash - so she has no direct descendants.
She has memories: traveling to Paris when the Eiffel Tower was still under construction, selling colored pencils to Vincent Van Gogh when he lived in Arles. She never had a profession, but dabbled in painting and piano.
She was born just four years after France lost the Franco-Prussian War, and was nearly 40 when French troops again fought the Germans in World War I.
Calment has been forced to give up her two cigarettes a day and her single glass of port before meals, but she still nibbles on chocolate.
Her birthday has prompted numerous articles about the fast-rising number of centenarians in France: 261 in 1945; about 5,000 now.
by CNB