Andy Young: Exploring current (and future) centennials

By Andy Young

I’ll be umpiring a Little League baseball game this coming Monday evening, which is oddly appropriate, given it’s the exact date that a ballplaying American icon, Yogi Berra, would have turned 100 years old.

Yogi Berra played on 10 teams 
that won the World Series and he
is immortalized in the Major
League Baseball Hall of Fame.
COURTESY PHOTO   

In addition to putting together a remarkable Hall of Fame career that saw him play for more World Series-winning teams (10) than any other player in history, Berra was the embodiment of the American dream. Born Lorenzo Pietro Berra, he grew up in the hill district of St. Louis, the son of Italian immigrants. Quitting school as a teenager, he joined the United States Navy, ultimately becoming a gunner’s mate who survived the Normandy landings on D-Day.

After the war concluded he doggedly pursued a baseball career despite possessing a 5-foot-7-inch, 185-pound frame that looked anything but athletic. Neither of the then-existing major league teams in his hometown, the Cardinals or the Browns, saw fit to offer him an acceptable contract, so he ended up signing with the New York Yankees, and subsequently spent all but the final four contests of his 2,120-game career wearing the black-and-white pinstripes of the perennially powerful Bronx Bombers.

By nearly anyone’s definition Berra’s life was an extraordinary one. He had a beautiful family, achieved unquestioned success in his chosen field, and attained material wealth through a combination of endorsement deals and wise investments. His adopted New Jersey hometown is the site of the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center, which is adjacent to Montclair State University’s home baseball field, Yogi Berra Stadium. He also appeared on a US postage stamp.

Unfortunately like every other individual granted that particular tribute, he had to die first in order to qualify for it.

Casual noticers of Yogi Berra’s would-have-been 100th birthday may think that starting an 11th decade of life isn’t that unusual; after all, accomplished people like Jimmy Carter, George Burns, Bob Hope, Henry Kissinger, Grandma Moses, Kirk Douglas, and Olivia de Havilland all reached that particular milestone.

And while a significant number of well-known folks who were, like Yogi, born in 1925 (or MCMXXV, in the land of his ancestors), didn’t make the century mark (Paul Newman, B.B. King, Barbara Bush, Johnny Carson, Angela Lansbury, Malcolm X, Margaret Thatcher, Rock Hudson, Medgar Evers, Robert F. Kennedy, Sammy Davis, Jr., William F. Buckley, Jr., and Laura Ashley, to name just a baker’s dozen), at this writing there are still a few noted 1925 natives hanging around, like Dick Van Dyke, June Lockhart, and, uh … Jiro Ono, the retired sushi chef who owns a restaurant in Tokyo, Japan. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

According to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank and trusted public opinion polling organization based in Washington D.C., people aged 100 years or older currently make up .03 percent of America’s population. More detailed statistics reveal that while there are currently around 101,000 people of triple-digit age in the United States, that number will increase to upwards of 422,000 by the year 2054.

The folks at Pew also report that America currently houses more centenarians than any other nation, but the number of individuals who’ve lived beyond the century mark is actually higher per capita in Japan and Italy than it is here. Projections suggest that by 2050 China will lead the world in centenarians, followed, in order, by Japan, the United States, Italy, and India.

Statistics such as these are fascinating, but are they accurate? After all, the Pew Research Center wasn’t founded until 1990. Why would anyone trust findings regarding longevity from a callow organization that’s only 35 percent of the way to reaching the century mark itself? <