Frank Turns 100
Julie Metz on her father's long life and big birthday. PLUS, an open thread on the centenarians in our lives: Do you have people 100 years old—or older—in your life? Or...are you 100 or older?
Readers,
Today we have an essay by Julie Metz (down below this section ⬇️) about her father, Frank, who recently turned 100. It’s a moving and inspiring piece about a man who has lived a lot of life, and his birthday celebration for twelve at Balthazar in SoHo.
Frequently people write to me suggesting I write about their loved one who is 100 or older. But I am doing a lot, and interviewing people at that age typically requires either visiting them in person, or having someone in their life who is technologically savvy help them with Zoom or FaceTime, or with filling out The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.
So, I thought this might be a good opportunity to invite all of you to tell us about the centenarians you know. Or, if you’re one of them, to tell us all about yourself. In the comments please tell us:
How old are you? Do you know, or have someone close to you, who is 100 or older? What would you like to tell us about them? What is inspiring about them? What have you learned from them? What do you suppose keeps them going? Are you 100 or older? What’s your secret to longevity? What’s it like, being your age? What’s good about it? What’s hard about it? What’s surprising about it? Answer as many or as few of these questions as you’d like! (If you’re commenting, please also do me the favor of hitting the heart button ❤️ for algorithmic purposes. Thank you!)
“Some of the best contemporary writing there is.” - novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin, who writes Sitting in Silence .
Here’s Julie Metz’s essay. ⬇️
Frank Turns 100
Julie Metz on her father’s long life, and big birthday.
According to census data, there are some 5780 centenarians in New York City. Now Frank Metz, my father, makes one more. Twelve of us celebrated this milestone at Balthazar in Soho, on July 4, the day after his birthday. We took over a row of banquettes, causing a stir in the nearby tables as people turned to watch the very elderly man take center stage.
“I’ve made a resolution,” Frank told me, “not to let everything happening in the world get to me.”
I welcomed this choice. Frank—who fought fascists during the last world war—has anguished, for the past ten months, over the assault of daily news. I’ve tried—mostly without success—to persuade him to watch less bad news, and to keep his TV viewing limited to sports and movies.
“I’ve realized there’s nothing I can do about any of this,” he continued. “I have to leave this to younger people. You all and my grandchild. Now, I want to spend time with my family and friends, paint in my studio, and read good books.”
I assured him that young people, including the afore-mentioned grandchild, now in their mid-late 20s, will be the ones to wrest power from the current would-be dictator and his slew of enablers. Frank’s insanely preserved memory—short and long term—is a blessing except in the case of politics.
My brother ordered up a magnum of champagne and we toasted. Frank tasted and approved, and ordered a dozen oysters and half a cold lobster. Longevity has only whetted his appetite for delicacies.
My dad is sanguine about the changes he’s witnessed—most of the Twentieth century and into this new one, run with gadgets he doesn’t want or need. He likes that I can order books for him on my phone, but for me, the time I spend with him reinforces the beauty of an analog life: ink on paper, paint on a canvas. He still reads the New York Times, loitering on the obituaries, where he sometimes sees a notice for a person he used to know.
Frank, like many in this city, came from elsewhere. His grandparents arrived in the United States around 1905, as Jews fled pogroms in Russia and Ukraine. He was born in Philadelphia in 1925, where his family teetered on the brink of financial ruin through much of his childhood during the Great Depression. In a time before the miracle of vaccines, Frank survived whooping cough, scarlet fever, and during the hot Philly summers, polio scares kept him and his younger brother indoors, away from public pools and parks. As he grew up, he experienced a deep hunger, both for food and something greater that he could not yet name.
He was 19 when he was drafted into the army in 1944 and served in a mortar battalion during the Battle of the Bulge. While dodging German bombs and snipers, he promised himself that if he survived the war, he would go to art school. He was still in one piece on VE Day; he remembers the joy and relief the troops felt as they fired their guns in the air to celebrate. He enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art on his first day back in Philadelphia.
Frank and his friends made frequent weekend trips to New York City to visit museums and galleries. He met my mother Eve on one of these trips, on a blind date. She was a Jewish war refugee from Vienna and a recently naturalized American who lived with her parents on the Upper West Side. By the end of that first weekend, Frank and Eve knew something big was happening between them. Against the wishes of his family, Frank left Philadelphia and moved to New York City to be with Eve. An attuned ear might detect faint traces of the singsong accent of his origin city, but in all the ways that matter he became a New Yorker, though he still roots for the Phillies and the Eagles.
After a few early jobs in graphic design studios, Frank was hired as art director of Trade Book jackets at Simon & Schuster. My mother also worked at S&S in book production. For thirty-four years they traveled to work together on the Number 5 bus; the meandering route and sluggish rush hour traffic gave them time to read the New York Times from front page to obituaries. Among Frank’s hundreds of art director hits: the classic covers of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and histories and biographies by Doris Kearns Goodwin. As a teenager I wrapped my text books in press proofs of Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men and the trippy jackets for Carlos Castaneda’s peyote adventures. S&S published everything from high to low, literary to potboilers. Frank loved his work, until he didn’t, and retired at 70.
For Frank, New York City isn’t a bad place to age. He lives in the same apartment where I grew up and where my mother died almost twenty years ago. Gentrification power-washed the scruffiness of the Upper West decades ago, the drug dealers have left the street corners, and the current population of his apartment building is younger and wealthier. He and Justine, my stepmother, can get to lunches and brunches at their favorite bistros with the help of Mari, their excellent caregiver. She came to New York City from Senegal twenty-five years ago and despite the current horrors, you will never meet a more enthusiastic American. Now they travel about town as a trio.
Our desserts arrived. Strawberry shortcake for Frank, with one candle. We sang loudly and out of key. He ate it all up, the shortcake and the bad singing.
My dad is sanguine about the changes he’s witnessed—most of the Twentieth century and into this new one, run with gadgets he doesn’t want or need. He likes that I can order books for him on my phone, but for me, the time I spend with him reinforces the beauty of an analog life: ink on paper, paint on a canvas. He still reads the New York Times, loitering on the obituaries, where he sometimes sees a notice for a person he used to know.
“I’ve lost friends to death,” he said, remembering my mother and friends now gone. “And then I’ve made new ones.” One of these new friends, now 70, flew in for the birthday bash. He told me that he has adopted Frank as the loving dad he never had when he was growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When he is home in San Diego, he calls Frank every day at 4pm to talk politics and sports stats. I love that in these last years of a full life, my father holds so many threads together and that he has been brave enough to embrace the new, at 100.
Previously Julie Metz wrote the essays “On Vanity” and “On Longevity, and the Stubborn Gene” for Oldster. She writes the newsletter Consider the Spider with Julie Metz.
Okay, your turn:
How old are you? Do you know, or have someone close to you, who is 100 or older? What would you like to tell us about them? What is inspiring about them? What have you learned from them? What do you suppose keeps them going? Are you 100 or older? What’s your secret to longevity? What’s it like, being your age? What’s good about it? What’s hard about it? What’s surprising about it? Answer as many or as few of these questions as you’d like! (If you’re commenting, please also do me the favor of hitting the heart button ❤️ for algorithmic purposes. Thank you!)
Big thanks to Julie Metz. And big thanks to all of you—the most engaged, thoughtful, kind commenters I’ve ever encountered on the internet. And thank you, too, for all your encouragement and support. 🙏 💝 I literally couldn’t do all that I do here without you. - Sari Botton
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Thank you Sari for creating this fantastic space to share stories about growing older and the thread of our existence.
I believe two of those photographs were taken by my father Seymour Mednick. Frank and Seymour met in art school. From then on they were lifelong best friends. Frank’s birthday is July 3rd. My father died on July 5th. I was tasked by my father with telling Frank, in person, that he had won a bet he hadn’t known he’d made. My father had bet, to himself, that he would outlive Frank who was two years his senior. The day before my father died he gave me those marching orders. A farewell and a good jest in a single sentence. I made my way uptown and managed to get out the announcement. Frank said “I lost my best friend. You lost your father. What do you say we join forces” Frank is the greatest. And a hell of a landscape painter too by the way.