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One of World's Oldest Dies in His Sleep
Torri Minton, Chronicle Staff Writer |
Tuesday, April 28, 1998
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Christian Mortensen, the cigar-smoking San Rafael resident who may have been the oldest man ever, has died at the age of 115.
Mortensen died in his sleep early Saturday morning, said Sharon Cook, public relations director for Aldersly Garden Retirement Community, where Mortensen lived for the past 20 years.
During the week before he died, the retired tailor, cowboy, boat builder and milkman joked, smoked and entertained, Cook said.
Nothing seemed different -- except he had more visitors and a few more cigars than usual.
``He started to perk up in the last month after a couple of colds,'' Cook said. ``So it was quite a surprise.''
Mortensen took up cigar smoking more than 90 years ago. He was married briefly 85 years ago. He liked to say that he rode up to Aldersly on his bicycle 20 years ago, and never left.
He had no living relatives.
At his 115th birthday party last summer, Mortensen, who was blind and nearly deaf, pondered his longevity.
``Friends, a good cigar, drinking lots of good water, no alcohol, staying positive and lots of singing will keep you alive for a long time,'' he said at the time. Mortensen preferred to boil his own water.
He also loved to sing, and he could hear when people talked to him through a small microphone attached to headphones.
One of his visitors last week was John Wilmoth, a demographer at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied Mortensen.
At one point, Wilmoth said that Mortensen was ``the oldest man alive . . . whose age has been reliably authenticated.''
``He's quite possibly the oldest man that ever lived,'' Cook said.
Last year, when 122-year-old Jeanne Calment of France died, Mortensen was named as possibly the world's oldest person.
But then the Guinness Book of World Records declared Marie Louise Meilleur, of Corbeil, Ontario, the oldest.
She died earlier this month, and the title passed to 117 year- old Sarah Clark Knauss of Allentown, Pa.
The Guinness Book of Records is still trying to sort it all out.
Mortensen was born Thomas Peter Thorvald Kristian Ferdinand Mortensen, on Aug. 16, 1882, in Skaarup, Denmark.
He lived, by some accounts, in 26 states.
One afternoon just before his 114th birthday, Mortensen lit up a smelly Danish cigar, broke into song and recalled coming to the United States on a ship in 1902, or maybe it was 1903.
``I don't smoke more than one cigar a day,'' he said at the time, stubbing out a cigar. Then he smiled and reached into his neatly pressed suit pocket for another one.
Private services will be held at Aldersly.
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