Morrie Markoff, a centenarian blogger and scrap metal sculptor who was believed to be the oldest man in the United States and whose brain was donated for research into what is known as hyperaging, died June 3 at his home in downtown Los. Angels. It was 110.
He had two strokes in recent weeks, his daughter, Judith Markoff Hansen, said in confirming his death.
People who live to be 110 or older are considered centenarians, and the Gerontology Research Group, in Los Angeles, lists more than 150 of them worldwide.
Mr Markoff, who was born in New York on January 11, 1914, six months before the start of World War I, joined the club this year and was considered the oldest living man in the United States after Francis died in January . Zouein, at 113, in California.
As of April, the world’s oldest living person is believed to be John Alfred Tinniswood, of England, at 111, according to Guinness World Records. (Guinness lists María Branyas Morera, a California native living in Spain, as the world’s oldest woman, at 117.)
When Mr. Markoff heard the news of his rise to the top of the list, “He just smiled and said, ‘Well, somebody has to be there,'” his daughter said in an interview.
He was remarkable not only for his longevity but also for his unusual lucidity for his age. Until his final months, he looked at the Los Angeles Times every morning, discussed the war in Ukraine and other world events, and posted missives about his life on his blog.
“He believed that if he continued to be active, he would live and he really wanted to live,” Ms Hansen said.
Mr. Markoff surpassed the threshold of what researchers call the super-elderly – a person over 80 whose brain looks decades younger. And that made his brain extremely valuable for research, said Tish Hevel, executive director of the Brain Donor Project, a nonprofit organization in Naples, Florida, affiliated with the National Institutes of Health.
“There is a critical need for this tissue for neuroscience research,” Ms Hevel said. “One in five of us now have some sort of neurological disease or disorder, many of which develop late in life. Scientists are going to learn so much from Mr. Markoff’s tissue about staying healthy into old age. It’s an incredible gift he gives us.”
Morris Markoff was born in a tenement in East Harlem, one of four children of Max and Rose Markoff, Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father was a cabinet maker. His mother “was a peddler who sold kitchen supplies,” Mr. Markoff once said in an interview posted on his blog.
His family of six since childhood shared a 400-square-foot apartment that had no closets, hot water, or a toilet (they used one down the hall) and was infested with vermin and bedbugs. “Burning the bed springs was an annual ritual among the residents of the apartment building,” he wrote in his 2017 autobiography, “Keep Breathing: Recollections From a 103-year-old.”
He overcame infection during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed the life of a brother. He remained in school until the eighth grade before training as an engineer.
In the late 1930s, Mr. Markoff moved to Los Angeles to take a job at a vacuum cleaner company. He arranged for his girlfriend, Betty Goldming, to move from New York and the couple married on November 4, 1938. They were together for 81 years, until her death in 2019.
Mr. Markoff later took a new job with the company in San Francisco, but was transferred back to Los Angeles before World War II. In 1943 he worked as an engineer for a defense contractor making artillery shells. After the war, he and a partner opened a series of small electrical appliance businesses in Los Angeles.
Mr. Markoff, a photography enthusiast, discovered his passion for sculpture while building a toilet in 1960. As he removed a broken copper float, he saw that it looked like a ballerina’s tutu, so he cut the float in half, affixing some screen “and, ‘voilà’, there was a ballet dancer lifting one leg in a practice move.” he wrote in his memoirs. “I had created something.” He had his first gallery show, in Los Angeles, at 100.
Mr. Markoff was just days from death and no longer lucid when his daughter decided that his brain should go to science. had expressed his support for organ donation, he said. It is believed to be the oldest cognitively healthy brain ever donated, Ms Hevel said.
Mr. Markoff attributed his longevity to regular walking. he and his wife, who lived to be 103, often completed three miles a day into their 90s, holding hands, they joked, “to keep themselves up,” his daughter said. He believed in eating simply, rarely drank alcohol and avoided water in plastic bottles.
“They thought those bottles were poison,” Ms Hansen said. When public health concerns began to arise about certain bottles, he added, “he called me and said, ‘J, did you read the paper? We were ahead of our time.”
