John Rutherford
From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Will Clark got to know Ronald Reagan in the 1930s when they rode horses together each Sunday for the Army Cavalry Reserve at Fort Des Moines in Iowa.
"We were good friends, but he was a very poor horseman," Will, 104, said recently of our 40th president.
Will was a dentist in Des Moines at the time, and "Dutch" Reagan was a popular radio personality on WHO.
"He was a gay young blade around town," Will remembers. "He had a convertible 
car, and he was a very attractive man, always a friendly sort of fellow."
Will's wife Lois, 101, also has fond memories of Reagan.
"We'd have breakfast on a Sunday morning, early, early, and he was always there, at Fort Des Moines, entertaining us all," she said. "I remember one morning he had some food and he happened to stumble just a bit and dropped it down my back."
Will said Reagan had a flair for the dramatic, even then.
"We loved the guy, but he was always 'on,'" Will told the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in 2001. "He was always the actor type, and he got a little boring at times with it. He was always talking, you know, on and on and on. He never stopped."
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Dec. 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy, is a day most Americans living at the time will never forget. That was the day, of course, that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War II.
Will Clark heard the news on his car radio in Des Moines, Iowa. Dick Day was dressing for church in Providence, R.I. Elizabeth Teal was home in Johnstown, Colo., and Yoshiko Akizuki was fixing dinner in Guadalupe, Calif.
Like the other centenarians, Will was shocked by the news on his radio.
"This guy was talking about corn, pigs and horses," Will recalls, "and all of a sudden he said, 'The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor!' Well, my father-in-law and I sat there for a few moments, and pretty soon he looked at me and I looked at him.
"'What'd he say?' 'The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.' But then the guy went on talking about pigs and horses and stuff, and I couldn't believe it. In about five minutes, why, everything broke loose and they started talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor."
More than 2,400 Americans were killed and the U.S. Pacific Fleet was crippled in the attack. Within weeks, the late Dr. J.C. Lockhart of Peoria, Ill., was on the first relief convoy to reach Hawaii.
"Did get out to Pearl Harbor and was tremendously shocked at seeing so much more damage than had been reported," he wrote a friend at the time. "Honolulu was sick. Martial law, and all stores closed at 4:30, all restaurants at 5:00. No lights were ever turned on. The sentries are so quick on the trigger that no one even walks out at night, much less drives."
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From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mickey Weiner supplemented his teaching salary at Irvington High School in New Jersey by repossessing cars for a local bank and working as a lifeguard, a waiter and a bartender.
"In general, everyone had a tough time because of the Depression years," Weiner, who just turned 100, said recently. "There was a lot of 
unemployment, and people who had jobs were lucky. I had a job, and I was pretty well taken care of. I had a new Ford I bought. It cost a little over $500."
Gas cost 12 cents a gallon back then, which was a good thing, because Weiner's salary was cut in 1932 from $1,800 to $1,200 a year. That didn't stop him from continuing at Irvington High for the next 42 years, retiring in 1974 as principal. He and his wife Ginny live in relative comfort because of investments he made over the years in the stock market.
"I've gotten myself a house and a lot that's worth about $1 million, and it's more than I earned teaching, and that's because of the stock market," he said.
Weiner believes today's tough times will turn around in a couple of years.
"It's a bad year," he said, "but it'll come back, that's the thing. Right now it's not too good. I think eventually it'll turn around and become better."
Another centenarian, 100-year-old Herbert Winckelmann of Staunton, Va., is also generally optimistic about the future.
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From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Centenarian L. F. Beasley sold his car when he went off to serve in World War II because he expected to be gone for 10 years and didn't want to come home to Tennessee to a 10-year-old car.
Dr. Beasley, 100, who now lives in Franklin, Ky., ended up spending four years in the medical unit of the 80th Infantry Division, including several nights in a French family's home in 1945.
"The people I was staying with couldn't speak English, and I couldn't speak French, so we didn't have a whole lot of fun together," he said recently.
The only German that Dr. Beasley ever tried to shoot was a German Shepherd dog that threatened to attack him.
"I thought I'd kill that dog, but my gun [a .25 caliber pistol] wouldn't fire," he said. That's the only time I ever tried to fire it, and it wouldn't fire. I had a driver, and he and I jumped in the car and left."
Dr. Beasley's mother was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1945, and he was "rushed" home by the Red Cross.
"I came home on what I thought was a cattle boat," he said. "It took us 10 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. When we went over to Europe, we went over on the Queen Mary and landed in four days.
"By the time I got home, she was much improved. When I got to New York, first thing I did was call home and found out she had left the hospital."
Since Dr. Beasley was already home, he was allowed to muster out of the military ahead of his unit. After the war, his son John asked him if he'd like to go back to Europe as a tourist.
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From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Thomas A. Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, apparently was more at ease in a laboratory than he was mingling among his employees.
Mary Fackino, 104, often saw Edison at the alkaline battery plant he owned in West Orange, N.J., but she was never able to meet him.
"I'd see him in the hallways, but he never stopped," she said recently. "He'd walk by with his head down. He was quiet. I never talked to him. He never spoke to the people in the hallway."
Mary's mother, however, knew Edison's wife.
"My mother couldn't speak English, and she wanted to learn, and Edison's wife wanted to learn how to speak Italian," she said. "But it didn't last long. It didn't work out."
Mary had gone to work for Edison in 1917 at the age of 13. Edison was not only a famous inventor, holding 1,093 patents, the most issued to any individual, but he was also an industrial leader, creating companies such as his battery plant for the manufacture and sale of his inventions.
"I had to go to work," Mary said. "My mother needed help when my father died young. I didn't even graduate grammar [school]."
One of her fingers and a thumb still ache from working on a power press at Edison's battery plant. After three years, she switched to the plant's in-house magazine, the Storage Battery News.
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From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Centenarian LaGrand Nielsen, who was Dwight Eisenhower's dentist in the Army, remembers the nation's 34th president as a good man with a great set of teeth.
"I met Ike in 1939 at Fort Ord, Calif., and that's where I got to know him pretty well," LaGrand, 101, of Sandy, Utah, said recently. "Checked his teeth a couple of times and cleaned them. Had a beautiful set of teeth. Wonderful fellow. Wonderful officer. He was a lieutenant colonel when I met him, but he ended up a 5-star general."
LaGrand saw Ike again in Washington, D.C., during World War II. Eisenhower and his wife Mamie invited LaGrand and his wife Beatrice to their quarters in Bethesda, Md.
"We spent the afternoon visiting for a couple of hours and had lunch, and we just had a wonderful visit," LaGrand said. "We talked about life and military life and what it had done for him, and I was a career man then myself. I was a captain, maybe a major at the time, and he was a general.
"Mamie and my wife got along real well," LaGrand said. "Mamie was very humble and sweet." CONTINUED >>
From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Tennis great Arthur Ashe once gave centenarian Margaret Dell a black eye, but she doesn't hold a grudge against him.
It happened back in 1973. Ashe, the first black man to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, was competing in a major tennis tournament in Washington, D.C.
"I was sitting in a box way up high, and he served, and the ball came crashing in and hit me in the eye," Margaret remembers. "I was alright, but I did have a black eye.
"Arthur was awfully upset. He came over to see what had happened, and I said, 'Well, you hit me straight in the eye, and it looks like I'm going to have a lawsuit,' and he said, 'Call my lawyer,' and, of course, his lawyer was my son, so we had a lot of fun over that."
Margaret's son, Donald, was Ashe's friend and lawyer for 25 years.< CONTINUED >>
From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Grace Wolford, who turned 100 years old on Aug. 15, still remembers visiting the White House in 1925 and shaking hands with President Calvin Coolidge.
"Our senior class went to Washington," she said recently. "We only had 33 in our class. They didn't all go. We had to pay our own way and everything. We left on a Friday and came back Sunday, on the train, the B & O."
Grace said she and her classmates from Ferndale High School in Pennsylvania had no trouble getting into the White House.
"Things weren't like they are today," she said. "At that time it wasn't a big deal, but today it would be. The president was sitting there in the lobby or someplace, and we all got to shake hands with him, any of us that wanted to."
Did Coolidge say anything to her?
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On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Ben Trimboli, who turned 100 years old on March 15, was one of the first American soldiers into Normandy, crash-landing in a glider.
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| Family photo |
| Ben Trimboli in the Army circa 1943. |
"We had more casualties landing with gliders," the former Army private said in a recording of his World War II experiences. "Those fields were all full of stumps and wires and everything. I unbuckled [just before impact] because I knew we were making a nosedive, and I landed on top of the pilot and copilot, who were dead. Getting out of the glider, the Germans were shooting at us, and we were firing back."
Ben and his fellow members of the 82nd Airborne Division fought the Germans foxhole to foxhole, field to field for three days, until June 9, when Ben's luck ran out.
"I got hit with a hand grenade," he said. "I saw my leg go up in the air, and there was all of this shrapnel behind my knee. The Germans came over and told the guys that could walk - they all gave up - to pick up the wounded and take them to the back."
Ben and the other wounded G.I.'s were put in a shelter along with wounded German soldiers.
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From John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington Della Jones, 105, remembers well Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, delivered 45 years ago today from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
"Oh, I thought it was wonderful," Della said of the historic 1963 speech. "I think we all should have a dream for our lives and work towards that dream."
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| AP file |
| In this Aug. 28, 1963, file photo the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington, D.C. |
Della's dream was to be a teacher, and she taught for 36 1/2 years, first in Kentucky's black schools and eventually in its integrated schools.
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