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Mr. Morrie Markoff

• Born on January 11, 1914, in East Harlem, New York.

• Oldest Man in America. Died in 2024 at 110

• Father: Max Markoff, born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1883. Died in 1979 at 96

• Mother: Rose, born in Poland in 1884. Died in 1964 at 84

• Wife: Betty Goldmintz, born in 1916. Died in 2019 at 103 

• Married on Nov. 4, 1938, for 80 years, ten months, 18 days

• They were one of only a few married couples living in their 100s

• Children: Judith C. Markoff-Hansen in 1941 and Stephen in 1943

Morrie's Story

(First ten pages – rough draft)

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Chapter 2

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Supercentenarian

Morrie Markoff, 110

“Boredom – I didn't know the word.”​​

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I was born, with no certainty, on January 11, 1914.

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That makes me the oldest known living American-born man in the United States.

There are no Baptismal or hospital records. My mother, Rose, a Russian Jewish immigrant, gave birth to me with only a midwife and neighbor attending. 

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I once asked my mother for my birthdate. She did not remember; she only remembered that it was a cold day. With little money to spend on coal, our apartment was always freezing and depressing in the winter. My mother rationed the coal we did buy and used it only during the evening hours when the family was home.

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The five-story tenement[1] apartment where I was born and where we lived, at 330 E. 101st in East Harlem,[2] was a "cold water flat," meaning no hot water and no heating. New York was in the midst of a cold spell that year. 

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In the summer, the apartment was stifling hot. 

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My father, Max, was thirty, and my mother was twenty-four. I grew up with three other children. My older brother, Joe, was about five years older than me. My sister, Yetta, was perhaps three years older. My brother, Harry, was about three years younger. There was no sameness among us.

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Joe, to this day, I know little about it. I don’t know where he slept. Yetta slept with Harry. My parents slept in the bedroom. I slept on two chairs my mother put together on heavy cushions in front of the stove. I had the coziest spot in the apartment.

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I was born into poverty – but not abject poverty – in a three-room, fourth-floor apartment harboring six people. 

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Although poor, we never went a day without eating. When I felt like eating, I always found food. When the pushcart vendors were still on the street, I would get their damaged fruit – apples with a soft spot, overripe cantaloupe, heavily spotted bananas (my favorite), and, when in season, slices of open-cut watermelon.

I would get three-day-old Kaiser rolls, bagels, and heels of dark Russian bread from the local bakery. From the dairy store, they would give me a piece of butter to smear on my bread. One store I did some errands for, like delivering packages, would give me a piece of cheese cut from a muenster round.

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Sometimes, I would go back to our apartment to see if my mother had left some cooked food in the pots, like soups, lima beans, or chicken, which she often did.

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Later, when we got an icebox, I would look in there for pieces of "langen" and "fleisch" (a slab of meat not in the form of a sausage). Once in a while, she would make a large pot of stewed fruit, prunes, apricots, and peaches. A few times, she would make a pot of finely chopped carrots and raisins called "tzimmes."

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In the winter, keeping stuff cold was not a problem. If and when we bought a milk bottle and stored it outside in the box my father built and used as our refrigerator, we didn't have to skim the cream from the top. In the morning, the cold did it for us. It had popped through the top of the bottle.

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I ate well; it was not gourmet, but it was always filling. My feast day was when I would find a large frying pan – from spoilage, but only in the winter – of calf liver, onion, and fried potatoes. Liver was the cheapest meat you could buy at the butcher. People bought it to feed their cats. To this day, liver is still one of my favorite meat dishes. 

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Our apartment was rat-ridden, the kitchen filled with scurrying cockroaches, and the springs in the mattresses filled with bedbugs. In the crevices of the heavy underwear we all wore were lice.

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Every week, my mother would comb the lice out of my hair and, to my disgust, explode them between her fingernails. In the summer, every kitchen had spirals of sticky wax paper that caught flies.

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That cockroach, bedbug, rat-infested apartment was not conducive to pleasant memories. I first smelled the odor of death when a rat died somewhere in the walls of the building, a horrible smell that permeated through the tenement for some time. Years later, just the memory of it made my mother exclaim, "Gottel hitlen" (“God should not let it happen!”).

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Everyone had a breadbox with a curved front cover that slid up and down. The purpose of having a breadbox was good, but it didn't work. Often, when I opened it, cockroaches ran out.

To this day, cockroaches repulse me.

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I remember helping my father carry our spring mattress to the community backyard. He would soak a rag in Kerosene, stand back and light it, and then throw it onto the spring; with a "whoosh," it was aflame.

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Burning bedsprings was a yearly ritual among tenement dwellers. Did it get rid of the bedbugs, which was its hope and intent? Only for a limited time; invariably, they were back-biting innocent sleepers. From my perspective today, I am more understanding. That's what bedbugs do. That's how they make their living.

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Imagine this – six people living in four hundred square feet of space. No closets. No heat. No toilet in the unit (there was a community toilet down the hall for four units). No hot water. Coal stove (and smoke). Because there was no place to put stuff, we wore the same clothing until they could be worn no longer. Kitchen equipment was only the basics. There is little natural light and not much fresh air.

 

We were lucky. My father, being a carpenter, built shelves, and the unit was filled only with necessary furniture since there was not much room to move around.

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Many of us slept outside on fire escapes on hot summer nights.

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Our fire escape faced the back of the tenements on 100th Street. Once a year, a fireman made us remove all our stuff, which we did. When he left, we put it back.

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Several times late at night, I woke up to the screaming and cursing of families fighting in other tenements. My mother told me later the unpleasant sounds sometimes came from a husband beating his wife or kids.

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There were never any fights in our family. When my father found out about a nuisance committed by our gang or me, he threatened and yelled at me. One look from my mother and he stopped.

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And the smells: the olfactory treat of freshly baked bread and cake when you entered the building, the acrid smell of frying fish, and the smell of bacon from the Polish families' apartments. My mother would hold her nose when she passed them. Her dislike was injected into me. I did not eat bacon until long after Betty and I were married. 

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Our friends would love to go to the local restaurant that made great bacon, eggs, and potatoes. I handed my friends my bacon. That stopped one day when I daringly took my first bite.

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Until the early evening hours, the tenements were a beehive of activity, often with groups of women in the entrance hallway, gossiping or exchanging news of interest, family, and children.

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In my building, the janitor moved the trash cans under the staircase to the front of the building for the collection trucks. In their place, he put a collapsible cot. A curtain was drawn across the underside of the top of the steps, and a wall made the space under the steps into a small room.

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The janitor told the tenants he took naps on them late at night. He lied. They were for the use of prostitutes who gave him part of their earnings.

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Roaming the City

Boredom – I didn't know the word. I always had something to do and places to go. By the age of eight, I was roaming the city.

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I am not a sitter unless I am reading. I have always been a walker and explorer, curious about everything and free to go anywhere. Neither of my parents ever asked me where I was, whom I was with, how I ate, or what I did during the day or night.

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If it was raining, snowing, or too cold to walk on the streets, I went to the library. If the library was closed, I snuck into the subway.

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The subway platforms, open and drafty, were always cold, but the subway cars were heated. I never paid the five-cent fare, which I rarely had, but I still explored the subway system. Small and slim, I could slide between the bars of a turnstile. Traveling everywhere was free to me. I didn't have money. I didn't need any. Through the years, I learned the streets and topography of New York.

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When I close my eyes, I can imagine how cozy I felt riding the subway cars, shaking side to side, being lulled to sleep, often missing my destination, if I had one. I was never bored. Usually, I would spend entire afternoons playing hooky and riding the warm subways. I learned the whole New York subway system, learning how to transfer from IRT[3] to BMT[4]  without paying the fare. I always found ways to sneak in. I was never caught, a perfect record.

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The desire to travel has always stayed with me. My destinations were longer distances. At thirteen, I hitchhiked to places like Albany, the state capital, and Montreal, Canada.

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Money, of which I had little, was never a problem. I managed to work costs out.

In my teens, with changing interests, I got off at Times Square. A new world of desire opened up for me. Theatres. Live performances.

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In those years, I went to innumerable plays, all free. I can't remember seeing a complete performance, nor do I recall much about them.

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I would hang around the exit doors at various theaters – the Belasco Theater[5] was my favorite – and I waited for intermission time when crowds exited. When a gang of people started to go back in, I picked an older couple and, alongside them, walked in. I waited until the performance started, spotted an empty seat next to seated people, sat down, and enjoyed the show. I never failed to find one.

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Only once was my action spotted by an observant usher who beckoned me to come to the aisle and follow him, which I did.

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He led me to the manager's office and the reading of the "riot act," threatening me with all sorts of dire punishments if they caught me doing it again, and led me quietly to an exit.

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The Neighborhood

Between First and Second Avenues on 101st in East Harlem, where I lived, was like no other street. Six days a week (but not on Sundays), until about seven p.m., it was alive with pushcart vendors selling fruits and vegetables of every variety. There were also some fish stands, where fish were displayed on top of crushed ice, and stores were selling all the basic items necessary for living.

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One pushcart had mussels and clams that, on demand, were shelled on the spot. Customers who bought them were handed a plate of them, then sprinkled them from one of a half dozen bottled spices. With a knife, they separated the clam from the shell and swallowed them whole with relish. The cost depended on the amount they ate. Jews don't eat shellfish or fish without scales, none that I know. They did not look tempting or palatable to me.

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All the shops on First Avenue catered to Italian needs. Completely different from the markets on Second Avenue, where other foods were displayed, often spread out in front of some of the stores.

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One store had dozens of hard cheeses of various shapes and sizes. Once in a while, I picked one up to smell. One good inhale, and I would turn away – not pleasant to this Jewish kid. In my house, we ate only soft dairy cheeses when we could afford them, which was rare.

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The street floor of every tenant had stores: bakeries that always exuded the pleasant smell of freshly-baked bread, meat, and pastry; grocery stores; specialty stores; stores that sold dairy products like butter and eggs; butcher shops; clothing stores; and for sure, the handicraft shops, tailors, shoemakers, and a hardware store that did repairs. On one corner was Wissner's Drugstore, and on the other was a paint, linoleum, and wallpaper store. That one street was like a self-contained city.

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Mr. Wissner’s Drugstore

While in primary school, I always had an after-hours job. At Mr. Wissner's Drugstore, my job was to get the person wanted on the public phone. Personal ownership of phones was unknown, so people used Mr. Wissner’s phone. 

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I got the job because I knew everybody in the neighborhood. I always made enough money to go to the movies (sometimes, I negotiated with the ticket seller who worked inside a four-foot-square box in front of the movie house).

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Mr. Wissner, the pharmacist and owner, a wonderful, kind man in his forties, should have been a doctor. Out of necessity he did much work gratis in their field, not his. Kids falling off fences, like me, falling off roofs, and car and wagon accidents because of jammed traffic conditions. People getting run over was quite common.

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All hurt people were taken to the drugstore. Mr. Wissner, being Mr. Wissner, dropped everything he was working on and tended to them. Untrained, he had a rare surgical skill, attested to by doctors who took over patients to whom he had given first aid.

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My job at his store was varied: I kept the large chemical supply bottled and the place clean, ran errands, opened cases of supplies, and kept the shelves stocked.

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My job was part-time, from three-thirty to seven p.m., six days a week. He paid me five dollars a week. Considering the hours I was supposed to work, I was among the top earners in my neighborhood. Very often, I didn't go home at seven p.m. but stayed until the drugstore closed at nine; better there than in my dreary apartment.

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Footnotes

[1] A tenement is a building that houses multiple living spaces, usually with apartments on each floor and a shared entrance stairway for access. Back to text

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[2] Located in Upper Manhattan in New York City, East Harlem is called Spanish Harlem or El Barrio. Its boundaries include 96th Street to the south, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East and Harlem Rivers to the east and north. While its name may suggest otherwise, it is typically not considered a part of Harlem. However, it is included in the Greater Harlem neighborhood. Back to text

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[3] In casual conversation, "IRT" is commonly used to describe the trains and lines that run on the original routes constructed by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Back to text

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[4] One of the three leading organizations involved in building and maintaining the New York City Subway system was the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT), which oversaw operations in Brooklyn and Queens. The BMT's lines were known by letters rather than numbers. Back to text

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[5] Located at 111 West 44th Street, between Seventh Avenue and Sixth Avenue in the bustling Theater District of Midtown Manhattan, the Belasco Theatre is a renowned Broadway venue. First constructed in 1907, it boasts three levels and 1,016 seats. The city of New York has designated both the theater's exterior and interior landmarks. Back to text

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