It had been Ericka’s friend and fellow high school teacher Shannon Humphries’ idea for Ericka to accompany Shannon and her advanced history students as they each chose a long-lived occupant of the facility and wrote down his or her oral history. The students had a large group of colorful and interesting senior citizens from which to choose; as testament to the migratory nature of Americans over the last one hundred years, the residents hailed from forty-one different states, including Alaska and Hawaii. There was Mr. Grimm, retired administrator of a Presbyterian boarding school in central Utah; and Mrs. Daltry, the wife of a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who had assisted in the investigation of the accidental dropping of a bomb on a rural South Carolina community in 1958; and Frieda Chapman, whose husband, a U.S. Navy captain, was severely injured during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Even after the project was completed, Ericka and Shannon continued to visit the nursing home every weekend, each looking forward to attending May 27’s “Celebration of Tri-century Centenarians.” The special ceremony (with punch and cake and a visit by Senator Joe Lieberman, who was believed to be on Al Gore’s short list for vice-presidential running mate that year) would honor fifteen of the home’s residents, who, having been born in the “Gay ’90s” and having been blessed by the “long genes,” were now in the unique position of having lived in three different centuries (if one is to stipulate, of course, to the debatable claim that the twenty-first century owns title to the year 2000).
New Englander Ericka and Mississippi-born Shannon had met at the University of Vermont. Both had been education majors and both had eventually roomed together in a rental house with three other coeds: Tian Gilliam, the adopted daughter of Montana ranchers; Claudia Wilmer, heiress to the Wilmer-HearMore Hearing Aids fortune; and Lindsey Royce from Gainesville, Florida, who was later called “One of America’s Thousand Points of Light” by President George H.W. Bush after she rescued an older woman, Josephine Charles, visiting from Derry, New Hampshire, from her car when it accidentally went into the Winooski River. In an amazing and somewhat disturbing coincidence, Shannon’s own nephew and niece were in the car with their father when it went into Arkabutla Lake in Mississippi that very same year (all three rescued themselves successfully; Shannon’s sister Bianca, alienated from her husband at the time, wasn’t present.) The five University of Vermont education majors, each hoping for a career teaching at the high school level, lived, coincidentally, next door to a retired high school principal named Cornell Rodgers (whom they called, with private mischief, “Mr. Rodgers”).
Shannon’s other sister, Heather, who resided in Hernando, just south of Memphis, suffered a nervous breakdown of unknown origin in 1996 and maintained only tentative ties to her sisters in the years that followed. Shannon and Heather’s parents, Piddy and Billy Humphries, lived for many years in their native Yazoo City, Mississippi, before moving up to Memphis, where Billy got a job as manager of a movie theatre in Whitehaven.
Ericka’s 107-year-old friend Catherine, who was nearly blind with cataracts and very hard of hearing, wasn’t as close to Ericka as was the old woman’s roommate, who had just joined the Centenarian Club in March. Gail Hoyt Hopper Rabbitt, who could not say that her one-hundred-plus years were nearly so tragic as those of her fellow centenarian, Mrs. Connelly (for whom the General Slocum steamboat fire of 1904 cast a cloud of dark remembrance that scarcely subsided during all the many years of her later life), had, nonetheless, enjoyed a far from trouble-free life herself. In early 1926, Gail’s first husband, Tillman Hopper, and his two brothers took all of the money that comprised their large family inheritance and put it into an invention of Tillman’s brother Hezekiah’s ingenuity and design: a life preserver with attached battery-powered propellers, called the “Poseidon-Peller.” The business the three brothers formed was doing well until the Stock Market Crash of 1929, when they lost their shirts, and Tillman, in despair, took a swan dive from his and his wife’s twentieth-story apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As might be guessed, he didn’t survive.
At least two of Gail’s fellow nursing-home residents were intimately familiar with the incident. Tillman’s plummeting body had barely missed landing on top of a friend of Pearl Patz’s. Pearl was Gail’s dining room companion. Leonora Touliatos was on her honeymoon in New York on that fateful day in late 1930 when the body struck the sidewalk only a few feet away from her. Not wishing to upset his blind wife, Leonora’s husband James waited several years before telling her the truth of what had occurred that day, perpetuating, instead, the fiction that the thud she heard next to her was a dead horse keeling over from heat exhaustion.
Also familiar with the incident was another member of the Centenarian Club, a woman from Hartford by the name of Frances Hellman. Frances and her husband Hank had come down from Connecticut for a weekend of sightseeing, dining, and dancing with their friends, the Petersons. When the body smacked the concrete, Frances reacted by slapping her cheeks in hard shock, and for hours thereafter looked as if she had over-applied her rouge that morning.
Though one of the occupants of the room next door to Catherine and Gail, Rory Hillard, had no special connection to the suicide, he nonetheless took an interest in Gail’s brother-in-law’s ill-fated invention. “It would have come in mighty handy for my buddy Torkleson and me when the Indianapolis went down and all the neighborhood sharks became ill-mannered.” A retired butcher (previously in the employ of Piggly Wiggly), Rory had moved to Fairfield County, Connecticut, from Houston after the death of his second wife to be closer to his daughter Regina and his five granddaughters.
The other thing casting a shadow over the life of Gail Hoyt (otherwise known as “The Rock-a-bye Girl” of 1900 Galveston hurricane association) was her rocky marriage to a philandering aviator by the name of Leslie Rabbitt (whom Gail decided had only married her because of their mutual love of flying and because he would be giving his wife the comical extended surname of Hopper Rabbitt).
Leslie, who was himself less rabbit and more pig (and once attended a masquerade party dressed as pig — snout and all — after reading about a World War I soldier who wore a pig nose in battle), descended from two fairly tainted bloodlines. In the late teens and early-to-mid-twenties (up until his arrest in 1926), Leslie’s father had performed hundreds of illegal abortions in the town of Winchester, Kentucky, which had resulted in no small number of client deaths. Leslie’s mother, Jettie Livergood Rabbitt, served a year in prison for filing a mischievous false police report in 1906 accusing the Livergood Family Association of Warwick, Rhode Island, of running a clandestine white slavery ring. The charge and the subsequent raid on the association’s 1906 reunion left the organization in a shambles from which it never recovered.
Leslie’s offenses, though comparatively more venial, were ruinous to the marriage: an ongoing affair with a wealthy middle-aged Fall River, Massachusetts lush by the name of Alice Rose Carteret, and an on-again-off-again long-distance relationship with a woman named Patsy Pullen, whom Leslie had met in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago during the city’s 1933-34 World’s Fair. Leslie continued to pilot airplanes after his messy divorce from Gail, and perished, arguably by his own hand, when in a drunken stunt in late 1944, he painted his personal plane in the colors of the Japanese Zero long-range fighter aircraft and ventured too close to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he was promptly shot out of the sky. The incident was covered up until 1987, when it was brought to light by a radio documentary producer in Madison, Wisconsin, named Byron Reeves, who was doing a piece on the 1947 Roswell UFO incident at the time, based on a book by two young authors with the Tweedledum-and-dee names of Kirk and Dirk.