US centenarian population to surge by 2054, census shows
Projections from the US Census Bureau indicate the centenarian population will quadruple from 101,000 in 2024 to around 422,000 in 2054.
unbranded – Lifestyle
Whether kneeling on rock-hard chick peas in a school closet (punishment for tugging a rich girl’s ponytail), staying behind the wheel of her Camry as a nonagenarian or living to be 112, supercentenarian Anna Natella is a champion of endurance.
The Fort Myers woman also is probably the oldest person in Florida, according to organizations that track such things, and one of the oldest in the U.S. (Pennsylvanian Naomi Whitehead is 114).
Living in a 112-year-old body, with its vision, hearing and memory challenges is daunting, but Natella is hanging in, well enough to greet family and eat cake at her birthday celebration last month.
The span of her life is breathtaking: The Titanic sank the year she was born, the same year William Howard Taft defeated Theodore Roosevelt. She lived through both World Wars, women winning the right to vote and a moon landing.
More than a century of the Mediterranean diet
“She has lived an incredible life,” says daughter Cindy Belisle, who believes her mom’s tremendous will has everything to do with it. After all, this is a woman who came to the U.S. at 13, taught herself English from a dictionary (which she now speaks with zero accent) and sewed winter coats in sweatshops.
Or maybe it’s all the Italian food, Belisle says. “She thinks it’s the good Lord, which is true, but Mom ate and cooked the Mediterranean diet her entire life. She eats a lot of fruit, olive oil, she never drank – well, maybe a little wine – and never, ever smoked.”
Natella cooked Italian feasts from scratch for the whole family of 15 or so, her daughter says: lasagna, struffoli, ricotta pies for Easter, ravioli, stuffed artichokes, bracciole and her hometown specialty, cavatelli – hand-rolled pasta from scratch. “On Sunday morning, she made what we called gravy (tomato sauce) and she would fry the meatballs, because you have to get that crust on them.”
Harsh nuns, sparse dinners and once-a-year shoes
Born to a poor family in southern Italy near the city of Bari in 1912, Natella started school with the nuns, where she was a math whiz and a bit of a terror, her daughter says, the kind of kid who would pull the pigtails of the wealthy girl who sat in front of her.
“You know what the nuns did? They had my mother kneel in a closet on chickpeas.”
But that was before her father pulled her out to work. His aim was to get all six of his children out of Mussolini’s Italy and safely to America. Everyone had to pitch in and waste was not tolerated.
One night when her father came home, little Anna was outside playing hopscotch. At dinner, which was either a piece of bread or two figs for each family member, her father looked at her. “You get nothing,” he told the girl, Belisle said. “My mother started crying and she said, ‘Why? What did I do? Why can’t I eat?’ “
Because hopscotch would wear out her shoes, her father told her. “They only got shoes once a year.”
From sweltering sweatshops to a skilled seamstress
Two by two, he got the passage for his kids to come over. When it was her turn, Natella was 13, with no idea how momentous the trip was. Though many of the other passengers fell ill on the voyage, Belisle says, “My mother never got sick. She ran all over the ship like a crazy woman. She doesn’t even remember seeing the Statue of Liberty. … those things didn’t mean anything.”
Once in the States, “She literally taught herself English by getting a dictionary and translating the Italian words to English,” her daughter says. The family settled in New Jersey, once again, Anna started school. Once again, her father took her out. Never mind that she was a math whiz, “She had to go to work. My mother was very upset but no – Grandpa said they needed the money … I think she made it through the sixth grade.”
So, Anna went to work in sweatshops, making coats by day and bringing piecework home at night.
“During the summer, she could literally peel the lint off her arms because there was no air conditioning,” her daughter says. It was awful work, but along the way, she became an excellent seamstress, and eventually got a job sewing in New York.
‘He saw my mother and that was it … He was the love of her life’
She met U.S.-born but Italian-raised Dominic in New Jersey. Delisle likens their story to a Hallmark movie. “One Christmas, she was coming down the escalator at Bamberger’s (department store), he saw my mother and that was it. They started dating and they got married.”
Five years later, Anna and Dominic, an electrical engineer, welcomed baby Mary, who was followed by Cynthia. Anna threw herself into home-making, her daughter says. “She cooked like a maniac. She cleaned like a maniac.” And she carried on the family tradition of strictness. When her daughters fell short, “We got hit with a wooden spoon. We’d hear the drawer open under the oven and we knew the spoon was coming out,” Belisle says. “But this is how she was raised.”
Eventually, the family grew to include four grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and seven great-great-grandchildren.
Anna and Dominic moved to Massachusetts before retiring to Pompano Beach. They didn’t get much time together there; Dominic died soon after of colon cancer. Anna never remarried. “He was the love of her life,” Belisle says. Instead, she threw herself into causes, heading up the Garden Club, the Woman’s Club – “She was Pompano’s Woman of the Year one year,” – and volunteering at Imperial Point Hospital.
She turned her clever fingers to sewing up sleeves for veterans who’d lost arms, and ”At Christmas, she literally made Christmas decorations for every single patient,” as well as for her family – elaborately stitched and sequined confections full of smiling Santas, scarf-wrapped snowmen and flying reindeer.
She also became a bridge shark, “and God help you, you would not want to be my mother’s partner. She only wanted to play with partners who knew what they were doing,” her daughter says.
Every Sunday, she would head to the cemetery to visit Dominic. “My dad’s stone – it’s a flat plaque in the lawn – she cleaned that plaque every Sunday with Vaseline until looked brand new,” Belisle says. “And when Mom passes away – I made myself make all the arrangements – she will be going back to Pompano to be buried with my father.”
After a couple of fender-benders, (“She was only going to church, the cemetery and the grocery store”) it became clear she shouldn’t be driving, so she gave it up at 97.
Natella eventually moved to Fort Myers to be closer to her daughter, living through several crises and recoveries along the way with her characteristic tenacity. “This woman fell and broke her hip, came back from it after rehabilitation, then fell and broke her femur at like 102,” Belisle says. “The doctor said he’d never done surgery on someone of her age,” but she was in such good health, she eventually walked again.
A lifelong Catholic, she remains devout. “My mother would say the Rosary for you if she knew you,” her daughter says.
Natella may not have been mushily demonstrative, “but I always knew my mother loved us,” Belisle says. “She showed us through her cooking, the way she was provided; she was selfless. She sent us to parochial school, she dressed us to the nines and she deprived herself.”
“She did for us things she couldn’t do for herself. That was her way of expressing herself.”