She was a remarkable woman who witnessed three centuries, two world wars and 20 US presidents. She was also the oldest person in the world and the last living American born in the 19th century.
But Susannah Mushatt Jones, who died in 2016 at the grand age of 116, had some surprising secrets to her incredible longevity – and they involved bacon and lace lingerie.
The former nanny, who was born in 1899 in Alabama to sharecropping parents, revealed that she ate bacon every day for breakfast and snacked on it throughout the day. She also loved to wear fancy underwear from Bloomingdale’s, which she once shocked her doctors with during a medical check-up.
“You can never get too old to wear fancy stuff,” she quipped.
She also chewed five sticks of Doublemint gum at once every morning, because “they’re making them so flimsy now.”
But Miss Susie, as she was affectionately known by her family and friends, had more than just a penchant for pork and lingerie. She was a philanthropist who used some of her salary to establish a college scholarship fund for African-American students at her high school. She was also active in her neighborhood for almost 30 years, participating in the “tenant patrol team”.
She never smoked or drank, but she surrounded herself with family who provided love and support and continued to visit every Sunday.
“She liked bacon and eggs, she liked to sleep a lot, she didn’t drink and smoke, she did marry but she didn’t have any kids,” her niece Lois Judge said of her lifestyle.
She moved to New York in 1923, where she worked as a nanny for wealthy white families. She married Henry Jones in 1928 but divorced him in 1933 and had no children.
She lived in a Brooklyn nursing home for the last years of her life, where she took only a multivitamin and a blood-pressure medication every day and slept about ten hours a night. She was blind and partially deaf, but still enjoyed listening to the radio or watching game shows on TV.
Her longevity amazed doctors and researchers, who studied her genes and health records. She was one of about 40 supercentenarians, or people who lived past their 110th birthday. She became the world’s oldest person in June 2015, after the death of Jeralean Talley.
She died peacefully in her sleep on May 12, 2016. The current oldest person in the world is Emma Morano, who was born in November 1899 in Italy. She has a similar secret to long life and happiness as Miss Susie.
“I never drink or smoke. I surround myself with love and positive energy. That’s the key to long life and happiness,” Morano said.