Viewfinder
Old...Old...and Beautiful
By Jerry Tallmer
Her name was Ann Smith, she was 111 years old, and she told Jerry Friedman, who’d gone up to Massachusetts to photograph her in early 2002, that she could remember standing as a child by a train trestle, staring up at Theodore Roosevelt. If that was when TR was running for vice president on the ticket with William McKinley, it would have been 1900, and she would have been 9 years old.
Ann Smith has left us now, but Emiliano Mercado del Toro, as of this writing, has not. Born August 21, 1891, in Cabo Roco, Puerto Rico, which brings him into his 115th year, he is at present the oldest known human being on earth. Don Emiliano told Jerry Friedman, when the latter came to photograph him, that as a boy picking pineapples with his father he caught a glimpse of Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt, the first U.S. president ever to visit Puerto Rico.
Jerry Friedman’s mother, Selma Nanezetta Friedman, is a mere 91, so she has no comparable memories of Theodore Roosevelt, but for all that it is she who, unwittingly, set her son on the course which has now led to a book, a high-school curriculum, a foundation, a movement, and a United Nations photography show of breathtaking old faces, all under the rubric of Earth’s Elders. You can see some of the faces on these pages.
“In 2001 I went up to visit my mother at a health-care facility outside Boston,” says 59-year-old retired hotshot advertising and TV-commercial photographer Friedman. “She was then 88 and losing her eyesight, and I like a CNN reporter embedded myself up there for four days to see what it was like to be her.
“I got up when she got up, ate meals when she ate meals, followed other functions. My mother was being read to, every day, by her best friend, Lotti Stern, who was then 101 and is now 106 and still reads to my mother every day. I was infatuated by this Lotti Stern, whose vivacity and recall are unbelievable. She opened my eyes, and as a photographer, eyes are very important.”
But that is not all.
“I also saw,” says Selma Nanezetta Friedman’s son, “what it was like to live in an isolated environment. People come in there but never leave. I saw a fabulous show of string and wood sculptures based on mathematical algorhythms by a former Princeton professor then in his mid-90s. These institutions are elder ghettos, where they” – administrators unspecified – “are able to very politely segregate the elderly and make them believe this is very nice. While in reality, the elderly are cut off from the rest of humanity.
“I saw [old] people light up when a child, a toddler, comes in, and then the light goes out when the child leaves ”
Has your mother left that place?
“No, she’s still there. She wouldn’t move for anything. She didn’t want to be a burden, and also didn’t want to be totally isolated living where I live now, up in the northwest corner of Connecticut.”
It was while driving back to his northwest corner of Connecticut that the idea hit Jerry Friedman.
“Here I am, a retired photographer. What can I do to bring a little more cheer into these people’s lives? Maybe take some pictures that they can send to one another. When I got home I went to the Internet and Googled the oldest person in America, and came up with a John McMorran, down in Florida, who was 111.
“Then I found a man, a demographer in Atlanta, Georgia, named Robert Young. I thought: [With Robert Young’s help] I’ll photograph some of the oldest people in America and put it together as a traveling photo show. But he was basically dismissive. Said: ‘I wouldn’t bother.’ That was, so to speak, a call to arms for me.
“Shortly after, I found about this 111-year-old woman in Massachusetts: Ann Smith. You couldn’t get more apple-pie than that. And what a feisty, very sharp, completely-take-charge woman she was. As a photographer in advertising and later television, I was always completely in control, setting up lights, giving orders, whatever. Here this Ann Smith took complete control. After the first roll of film I went to put in a second. She said: ‘That’s enough – you’re finished.’ No one talks to me like that ”
But Ann Smith did, and he loved it.
“She was the first person I’d ever photographed who could tell me what it was like to live in three centuries. My first experience with someone who’s what’s called a super-centarian, 110 or more years old. I said to myself: You better start taking notes. There are 300 to 400 such validatable people – on a planet of, what is it, 700 billion of us?”
Friedman got in touch with Robert Young again.
“This time he said; ‘If you’re really serious about your project, come to Atlanta.’ I got on the plane. He looked at my stuff and said: ‘You know what? I’ll help you.’ He opened up his data bank — not just the United States but around the world.
“After the third or fourth person, I began to realize I had something. And I saw that they all had certain things in common: They all had worked, all had been poor, all had a sense of humor.”
Say, Mr. Friedman, what about those remote tribes of men and women in Central Asia who all live to be 110 and up on a diet of yogurt?
He smiled. “That’s Dannon advertising,” said the man whose cameras and know-how had been put to the service over the years “of American Express , Volvo , Crest , Pepperidge Farm , you name it.” Pause. “Life was good to me. What can I say? I was in the right place at the right time.” Pause. “Maybe all that was a means to an end, and maybe this is the end.”
An end which is also a beginning, by way of an Earth’s Elders Foundation (www.earthselders.org); a book (Earth’s Elders: The Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People), of 62 wondrous weather-worn faces in photos by Friedman plus words by Robert Coles, Lama Surya Das, and former Surgeon General Dr. Joyce Elders; and then the opening this past June of an exhibit at UN Headquarters in New York of 50 of those faces along with remarkable stories that cover everything from the assassination of William McKinley to the invention of the automobile and the washing machine to the fall of the last Chinese Dynasty, to Hiroshima.
The exhibit includes montages about three of those 62 super-centenarians – a focus by kids from Park West and Manhattan Bridge High Schools in New York.
“What I learned,” says Friedman, “when travel took me outside the United States, was that no other country treats the elderly as we do” – i.e., as dismissively. “Pick a place: Holland, England, Japan, Mongolia. All better than the U.S. Witness Katrina. The elderly, the poor, the young – always abandoned. Just wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world. Well, it might happen in Mogadishu – but in fact it happened here.
“So this is why I got on another track. Who better to change things, change the culture, than the young? In late 2004 I went to the Bank Street College Graduate School of Education, on West 112th Street, and showed these images to the director there, Nancy Gropper. She was delighted to start a pilot curriculum based on three of the people I had photographed.”
One was Betty Wilson of New Albany, Mississippi, whose mother and father had been slaves. One was Susie Potts Gibson, also of Mississippi, whose parents had been slave owners. “She could remember digging up ‘Pity Balls,’ musket shots from the Battle of Shiloh.” And one was Don Emiliano Mercado del Toro, who was a kid of 8 picking pineapples in Puerto Rico when Teddy Roosevelt passed by and is at this moment the oldest man alive.
“Now we need to take this to another level,” says Friedman. “Corporate sponsorship.”
Jerry Friedman’s father, Boston attorney Henry Friedman, lived to be 79. The “Nanezetta” that is Jerry’s mother’s maiden name was bought by her father, Jerry’s immigrant grandfather – a Russian Jew who looked like Cochise and didn’t favor serving in the Czar’s army – when he needed a doctor’s monicker to paste on the patent medicine he was peddling across the States.
Jerry’s children are Zachary, 28, a software programmer, and Zoe, 32, a chief resident at Metropolitan Hospital, New York City. Jerry Friedman himself, up there in the woods of northwest Connecticut (when he isn’t everywhere else in the world), is engaged to be married again. She’s Cheryl Nesbit, a vice president at Corcoran Group. May they live to be 125.
Earth’s Elders: The Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People, by Jerry Friedman, edited by Mark Chimsky, 215 pages, hardcover, $29.95, is available at leading bookstores or from the Earth’s Elders Foundation,
Post Office Box 111, South Kent, Connecticut 06785.
