George Francis remembers the sinking of the Titanic.
"It was terrible. Hundreds of people died," he recalls, his expression turning grave as he described seeing pictures of the Titanic in his hometown newspaper and reading the accounts. He was 16 years old at the time.
Francis, a Sacramento resident and parishioner of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, has lived through a lot of American history. At 112 years old, he is the oldest man in the United States, as verified by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Francis remembers trying to join the Army during World War I, but he was rejected because he only weighed 99 pounds - "too slight to carry the 50 - pound backpack into battle," explained his son, Tony Francis, in the family's recent interview.
George Francis was born in New Orleans on June 6, 1896. Growing up in the city's famous Seventh Ward, he listened to his neighbor Louis Armstrong play the trumpet in the Mardi Gras parade and remembers Booker T. Washington, the author of "Up From Slavery," speaking to his grammar school class when he was seven years old.
Born more than 60 years before the civil rights movement, Francis has witnessed technological and social changes in his lifetime, not only in the country at large, but also in the Catholic Church.
He was 20 when Corpus Christi Catholic Church opened in New Orleans' Seventh Ward in 1916. He became Catholic at Corpus Christi in order to marry Josephine Johnson, the young Catholic woman he was courting. George and Josephine Francis had four children who survived to adulthood: Anthony, Lelia, Shirley and Althea. In a time when it was common for babies to die at birth or during infancy, George and Josephine lost six babies before Tony was born.
While Francis was a parishioner at Corpus Christi, it was the largest black Catholic parish in the United States, with between 12,000 and 14,000 members. It was eventually broken up into smaller parishes, but until New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina, Corpus Christi was still a large and influential black Catholic parish which nurtured generations of black Catholic administrators, politicians, legislators and judges.
If Francis had decided to go to Mass at nearby Sacred Heart Parish, however, in those days before the civil rights movement, he would have had to sit in the back of the church.
"There were black churches and whites churches then," explained Francis's daughter, Lelia LaRue. "But it wasn't like it is now. There was no different music or anything like that at the black churches. The Masses were exactly the same."
"You have to understand the place and the time," LaRue said. "New Orleans was a Catholic city, and a Creole city. Everybody was Creole, and everybody was Catholic."
Francis' children recall that their father emphasized the importance of education. At a time when a high school education was not widely available to black Americans, Francis completed the sixth grade.
All of his children graduated from high school and continued their educations. Shirley retired as executive secretary to the director of the California State Office of Administrative Hearings. Althea became a Head Start teacher. Lelia worked for the California Department of Social Services. Tony holds a master's degree in public administration and retired as a civil servant.
"The most wonderful thing about my father is that he took care of his family," said Francis's daughter Shirley Wade. "He was a barber, a mechanic, and a chauffeur. He drove a truck and did general hauling. During the Depression he did manual labor for the WPA ( Work Projects Administration ) ."
Francis said that his favorite work was being a barber. When the family moved to Sacramento in the 1940s, settling in Oak Park and becoming members of Immaculate Conception Parish, he opened a barbershop.
"He had an outgoing personality and a sense of humor about things," Tony Francis said, "and he loved to be independent, so he did very well as a barber."
Francis has become hard of hearing, so his children fill in the conversational gaps with stories and explanations, but Francis himself is completely alert, sense of humor intact. When asked what he wanted for his birthday, he replied, "Money!" and laughed.
Francis said that he'd have liked to make more money, but that he got by with what he did make.
"We didn't have a lot of money," he said, "but we had a lot of happiness. We never had a lot of grumbling or fighting. I said, 'You live in this house together, you live peacefully - no fighting. You're in this house together.'"
His children nodded, listening.
"We didn't fight,' Wade said. "We were brought up to be peaceful. And we lived in a cheerful house."
The children remember their father always singing or whistling, generally in a cheerful mood. It's their father's personality to be outgoing and positive, they said.
Francis's longevity defies a few modern ideas about cholesterol and pulmonary health. He smoked cigars until he was 75, and since childhood has dined on eggs, fried foods, spicy foods, milk and cream, and salt - pork sandwiches. He loved to cook the meals he grew up with: spaghetti and meatballs, gumbo, Louisiana Hot Links.
On the other hand, he has always stayed active. He loved to dance. When the children were small, Francis and his wife took the kids dancing with them. Francis and his wife continued to go out dancing until Josephine died in 1963. Francis also bicycled, played baseball and loved to swim.
He prays the Lord's Prayer every day, he said. His mother taught it to him, along with "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep." He taught those same prayers to his children.
When asked the secret of his longevity, Francis answers "Mother Nature." With his children around him, all past retirement age, yet seeming a couple of decades younger, his answer seems accurate.
Then Francis adds another item to his longevity secret: "Honor your father and mother," he said, "and your life will be lengthened."
His children learned that lesson, too.
Denise MacLachlan writes for
The Catholic Herald, newspaper of the
Sacramento Diocese. Article reprinted with permission.
