Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 18, 1995                   TAG: 9510180081
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PARIS                                LENGTH: Medium

HOW DID SHE MANAGE TO OUTLAST 'EM ALL? IT'S BEEN FUN

She was born a year before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, was 14 when she met Vincent Van Gogh and 20 when the first silent movies were screened.

On Tuesday, after 120 years and 238 days on the planet, Jeanne Calment's name went into The Guinness Book of Records as the oldest living person whose date of birth can be authenticated.

``I wish the world the same life as mine: rosy and successful,'' she said from her nursing home in Arles in southern France.

Hard of hearing and nearly blind, Calment surpassed Shigechiyo Izumi of Japan, who died in 1986 after living 120 years and 237 days.

There have been several reports from various countries of people claiming to have lived up to twice as long, but with little or no proof of their birth dates. Calment's birth date is considered incontestable; it is based on numerous civil and religious records.

``Staying alive is the most competitive of all records. All 5.2 billion of us are at it,'' said Norris McWhirter, the Guinness Book's founding editor. He planned to visit Calment today and give her a special citation.

Since 1985, she's been living at a nursing home that has been renamed after her. She has used a wheelchair since breaking her leg and elbow in a fall in 1990.

Through it all, she has kept a keen sense of humor. Asked at her 120th birthday bash Feb. 21 to describe her vision of the future, she replied: ``Very brief.''

And last weekend, bracing for a fresh media crush, she joked that she was ``waiting for death and the journalists.''

Calment has been forced to give up her two cigarettes a day and her single glass of port before meals, but she still nibbles chocolate, her one vice.

She was born in Arles on Feb. 21, 1875, just four years after France lost the Franco-Prussian War, and has lived through the administrations of 27 French presidents.

She's been the oldest living person since 1991, when former record-holder Carry White of the United States died at 116.

Her father died at 94 and her mother at 86. 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 vividly recalls traveling to Paris when the Eiffel Tower was under construction, and selling colored pencils to Vincent Van Gogh when he lived in Arles and frequented her father's shop.

The painter, she recalls, ``still had his ear'' but was ``ugly as sin - ill-tempered, a grumbler and smelling of alcohol.''