No, this piece isn't about a bad movie about Roman legionnaires. It is about real people today who have reached a remarkable milestone--they are 100 years of age, some more than that! They are among the 76,000* Americans who hold the distinction of being centenarians, a group now believed to be the fastest growing group of Americans. Some of them are well known because of their celebrity: e.g., the late George Burns and Bob Hope. Others are ordinary people who have lived extraordinarily long lives. Each of them is a page of history like our own patient, Miss Mildred Horton, whom we profiled prior to her death in 1998. And everyone should read about the remarkable Celeste Brown Gough, mother of our benefactor, Phyllis Gough Huffington.

From time to time we will highlight a new centenarian. We are fortunate to be able to reprint, a series of fascinating articles on centenarians published in the August 28/September 4, 1995 issue of U.S. News and World Report( superbly written by Lynn Rosellini and beautifully photographed by Kevin Horan. The first person featured was Ms. Audrey Stubbart, who at age 100, still works a 40-hour week at The Examiner in Independence, Missouri. I talked to Ms. Stubbart recently about her writing a piece to preface those about her fellow centenarians whom we will be featuring this year. She graciously accepted our offer. She's done a lot of journalistic work, but none on the Internet so far; thus, she will be one of the few centenarians to have written in cyberspace about her counterparts. Next, we featured Tom Lane, who just turned 102, a mere 20 years after starting to swim competitively.

We then met York Garrett, III. At 101, this man, whose father was born in 1863, the year that Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, and whose grandparents were married as slaves on a plantation in North Carolina, still works as a pharmacist in Durham, N.C. This gentle, but tenacious man went to segregated schools across the river from his hometown of Tarboro; he worked hard for 50 cents a day but persevered and kept going to school until he got into Howard University's pharmacy school in 1916; he served in World War I, and returned to graduate from Howard with honors. It was then that he came face-to-face with the reality of being a person of African American heritage in his place and time. Listen to Mr. York's own words: "After you finished pharmacy school, whites and coloreds took the same examination, but we only got licenses to serve colored people. The system was pretty rigged. Even if Negroes passed, they usually didn't get licensed the first time out. I got a 90--one of the highest grades--but had to go back a second time to get the license." Still, he persevered and ended up with his own drugstore. Mr. York's business prospered, and during the tumultuous civil rights era, his store became a community meeting place for black people: Now it is for both blacks and whites. Mr. York, thanks for your perseverance, especially since you've been doing it for over a hundred years! Click here to read the entire article about this remarkable centenarian.

For those scholars out there wanting to pursue the subject of centenarians further, go to our "Links" button and click on the Alta Vista search engine, then type the word "centenarians" and hit the submit button. Up jumps a ton of interesting links, particularly this one: Medline references for Centenarians and Oldest-Old. Also, Dr. Thomas Perls at Harvard University is studying the DNA of centenarians to determine if differences in the oldest old and those in their 80's differ significantly.

*Statistics are from the U.S. Census Bureau for July 1, 2002 taken from the Internet on August 2, 2002. The same source projects the number of centenarians in 2010, the year before the Baby Boomers start turning 65, to be 129,000. Will you be one of them?