THE NEW YORK TIMES – One of the oldest men in the world died in August at the age of 111. The man, John Farringdon, was born about a year after the Titanic sank.
Mr. Farringdon was one of very few people to have lived long enough to see the world evolve for over a century.
And so have a handful of women who have died in recent years.
Kane Tanaka survived two world wars, the 1918 influenza outbreak and two rounds of cancer, but she also outlived all of her children.
Mamie Lang Kirkland’s childhood was scarred by lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. She grew up to become a door-to-door saleswoman for Avon, dispensing beauty products and life advice.
Hester Ford lived long enough to have 120 great-great-grandchildren.
And this week, Maria Branyas Morera, an American-born Spanish woman who lived through Spain’s civil war and the brutal Franco regime and was believed to be the oldest person in the world, died at 117.
Each of these women was a supercentenarian, a person who has lived past age 110. Here are Times obituaries for them and other supercentenarians who recently died. We hope you find their lives as interesting as we did.
Ruthie Tompson (1910-2021)
She worked on Disney animations for more than 40 years and died in her retirement home in California at age 111.
As Ruthie Tompson walked to school each day as a child, she passed the Disney film studio and would peer into its offices. Walt Disney himself saw her and welcomed her inside to watch the animation process.
Years after their first meeting, Mr. Disney invited her to join the studio as an inker and painter. She was later promoted to help edit and perfect the thousands of drawings that made animated features.
Over four decades she worked on nearly every one of Disney’s animated features, from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” released in 1937, to “The Rescuers,” released in 1977.
