People Who Shrink History

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

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In 1973 I met a man who told us how he had grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and when he was a boy, his next-door neighbor was a famous man, a really famous man. The mad monk, Rasputin.  I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.

In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour shared his secret. He was sitting in Ford's theater the night Lincoln was shot. He was 5 years old and remembered John Wilkes Booth bounding from Lincoln's box onto the stage.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes lived long enough (1841-1935) to shake hands with both John Quincy Adams (b. 1767) and a young John F. Kennedy (d. 1963). One man, "spanning 200 years of American history."

President John Tyler, born in 1790, was the tenth president of the United States and has two grandsons who are reportedly still alive today.

Three Civil War widows, Maudie Hopkins, Alberta Martin and Gertrude Janeway, lived into the 21^st century! Two of them collected their husbands' pensions until their deaths.