Prologue: Vito and MarieRose LaPorta were immigrants from Sicily. When he was seven years old, Vito passed through Ellis Island teeming with those huddled masses of persons from Europe seeking a better life. Can one imagine what he must have thought and endured? He made it, though, becoming a barber and working hard. He saved enough money to return to his hometown and marry his sweetheart. He brought clothes for the wedding and the return to New York with his new bride. The story is that the entire town turned out to see the stylish young couple in those fancy clothes. Were it not for what these brave people did, there would be no story to tell.

The Rest of the Story: Three years after her parents returned to New York City, on Friday, November 3, 1905, Marie was born. Young Marie had three sisters and three brothers growing up in New Jersey in a family that retained many Italian traditions, including the celebration of St. Joseph’s day. She graduated from Washington Irving High School in New York City, majoring in fashion design and working as a seamstress all of her life. On January 28, 1940, she married John Lobin, Jr.; she has one child, Rosemarie, and a granddaughter, Theresa Nocerino. In 2002, Marie moved from New Jersey to Rancho Mirage, California to live with her daughter and son-in-law, Vincent Nocerino. She still remains active, attending church functions and is a guest member of the Mission Hill Country Club.

Shown below are photos of Marie at age 18 (in 1923!); with her schoolmates in New York City (she’s third from left on the front row); at her wedding to John over 65 years ago; and Marie today in California.

Marie Today

Marie's Wedding

Marie's School

Marie at 18

In looking at these photos, the reader can’t help but be amazed at the span of history from the first quarter of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century that this lady has experienced. The year Marie Lobin was born saw Albert Einstein publish a paper on his theory of relativity, a scientific landmark that changed the world; that same year Robert Koch won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his pioneering work in microbiology that led to medical breakthroughs that changed the world; and in his book, 1905, Leon Trotsky recounted the occurrences of Red October as the seminal ones that presaged the Russian Revolution 12 years later, an event that clearly changed the world for most of the 20th century.

And a few of the notables of Marie’s birth cohort are Christian Dior, Maria von Trapp, Ayn Rand, Joseph Cotton, Henry Fonda, Greta Garbo, and Howard Hughes. In their own ways they, too, changed the world. And so has Marie: As she joins that elite club, The Centenarians, she and the other 70,000 or so persons in the U.S. who are 100 years of age or older are changing the way we look at aging.

What we learn from Marie and her fellow centenarians will, no doubt, change the world for the better. So on this wonderful day, the faculty of the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, extends best wishes to Marie for that most special of Happy Birthdays, her 100th one.

Epilogue: Somewhere in the world this year, perhaps in New York City or in Palermo, a little girl will be born who will also live to be 100 years old. What will the world be like for her and her birth cohorts along the way? Will it be a better place? It’s up to us to help in that regard. We can support research in aging that might help more persons like Marie Lobin to not die of heart disease and cancer and the myriad other diseases that shorten and compromise the quality of our lives. And we can help to make the world that little girl will grow up in a safer one, a cleaner one, a sustainable one.

And wouldn’t it be great to be around on that certain day in 2105 when someone will be doing a search of the Internet, or whatever its successor will be called, and will find this piece on the life and times of Marie LaPorta Lobin? I suspect the reader will remark that she had a long life well lived. And that’s the goal of those of us in gerontology and geriatrics. We do what we do for all the Marie’s of today and those of tomorrow, too.

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