Besse Cooper, born around the time the vacuum cleaner was invented, turns 115 years old Friday in Monroe, adding another day and another year to her title as the oldest person in the world. It’s a title she has won, amazingly enough, twice.
At a birthday party in a nursing home that will be attended by family members and a researcher from Guinness Book of World Records, she’ll get her second oldest-on-earth plaque from the organization that certifies who among us is longest in the tooth.
“We thought one was enough,” her son, Sidney Cooper, 76, quipped Thursday.
This year’s celebration will be low key compared to last year’s birthday party that featured an Elvis impersonator. But her son said his mom has slowed down this year, although doctors say she is still surprisingly healthy and all her vital signs are normal.
“She still remembers things and thinks clearly and talks,” said Cooper. “But she has her good days and her bad days. I’d say she sleeps about 80 percent of the time.”
Cooper was declared the world’s oldest living human by Guinness World Records last January, only to lose the title in May when Guinness discovered Maria Gomes Valentin of Brazil was 48 days older. When Valentin died June 21, Cooper again became the world oldest human.
That on again-off again world oldest title caused a bit of consternation with her family. Sidney Cooper said they didn’t know quite what to do with her first plaque.
“When the other woman was discovered, I took it out of her room and back home because it just didn’t seem quite right to have it on display if she wasn’t the oldest,” her son said.
Besse Cooper was born in Tennessee and moved to Georgia during World War I to find employment as a teacher. She married husband Luther in 1924. They had four children. She now has 12 grandchildren and more than a dozen great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Luther died in 1963.
Sidney Cooper said he's not sure his mom comprehends that she's the oldest person in the world. "If she does, she might not retain it," he said.
And in a way, that's in keeping with how she's lived life. "She never worried," said Sidney Cooper. "She just never was a worrier."
Besse Cooper once gave her own explanation for a life lived so long that her birth (August 26, 1896) predates by seven years the Wright Brothers invention of the airplane: "I mind my own business,” she said. "And I don't eat junk food.”
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