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Certainly the longer we live--and statistics indicate a trend toward greater longevity--the more there will be to write about. Hunter College's DeSalvo insists that it is never too late. "If you're 55 or 60, and you haven't yet written," she remarks, "you've got all this past, and it's thrilling." As a witness to the 20th century, Brooklyn-born Grace Pierson Lewis has an exceptional past to record. At 101 she remembers what it was to live without refrigeration and electric streetlights, without automobiles and antibiotics, without talking movies and airplanes. She has lived through two world wars and met Annie Oakley, Pope Benedict XV and Benito Mussolini. Ten years ago, she enlisted her granddaughter, Anne Lewis Drake, to help with her life story. Organizing events by decade, Lewis made an outline and, just as Freddie Mae Baxter did, talked into a tape recorder. Occasionally she would hand Drake a tape that was blank because she had pressed the wrong button. "But she would just sit down and do it all over again," Drake says with admiration. "She was very dogged." As each decade was recorded, Drake would transcribe and edit it. When her grandmother finished, Drake printed and bound 100 copies of the manuscript, complete with family photographs. They were proudly presented as gifts at a family reunion. Says Lewis, who lives in the Osborn retirement community in Rye, N.Y.: "I did it for my children and grandchildren so they would know where I'd been and what I'd done, and it would encourage them to do the same or reach for more." There could be no better legacy.
--With reporting by Michelle Adelman, Adrianne Navon and Megan Rutherford/New York, Erik Gunn/Kenosha and Timothy Roche/Pensacola [BOX]
GRACE P. LEWIS A century of remarkable experiences
In March of 1919, I went with Mama and Dad to Pinehurst, to the Carolina Hotel... Staying at the hotel was Annie Oakley, the famous sharpshooter. She was there to instruct some of the ladies at the hotel how to shoot and so I joined the group. She was a quiet, little person--nothing like you would imagine. One night there was a costume ball and I thought it would be fun to impersonate her. She was delighted to loan me the outfit she wore from her days touring with Buffalo Bill! It was a fringed leather jacket and skirt with a hat that had a six-inch-wide brim. I won the prize.