Morrie Markoff, the world's oldest Jew and the oldest man in the United States, dies at 110. His brain will be given to science for super-aging research. On June 3, Morrie Markoff, who was regarded as the oldest person in the United States, passed away in downtown Los Angeles. He was 110 years of age.
According to his daughter Judith Markoff Hansen, he attributed his long life to regular walks—he and his wife walked three miles a day into their 90s—simple eating, avoiding alcohol, and drinking water from plastic bottles, which he considered to be "poison."
According to The New York Times' obituary, Markoff was born in New York City on January 11, 1914, six months before the start of World War I.
Individuals who live to the age of 110 or more are known as "supercentenarians." More than 150 of these people are listed by the Gerontology Research Group worldwide. After Francis Zouein passed away in January at the age of 113, Markoff became the oldest man still living in the United States. “He just smiled and said, ‘Well, someone’s got to be there,'” his daughter said, when he found out he was at the top of the list.
Markoff was notable for his mental health as well as his long life. He read The Los Angeles Times day to day, discussed world occasions and posted on his blog, as per news reports. His brain has been donated to study "super-aging" research. According to Tish Hevel, chief executive officer of the Brain Donor Project, a Florida nonprofit that is affiliated with the National Institutes of Health, "his mental acuity at such an advanced age makes his brain of value to science." According to NeuroBioBank, Markoff’s is likely to be the oldest brain registered and collected without pathological cognitive decline.
Markoff was brought into the world in an apartment in East Harlem, N.Y., one of four offspring of Russian Jewish outsiders Max and Rose Markoff. Six people lived in a 37-square-meter apartment that had no closets, hot water, or toilet. He attended school only till the eighth grade and made it through the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic but lost his brother to the illness. He married his girlfriend Betty Goldmintz on November 4, 1938, and their marriage endured 81 years until her passing in 2019. He also worked as a machinist for an artillery shell-making defence contractor in 1943. And even had his first gallery show in Los Angeles at the age of 100 and wrote his own memoir “Keep Breathing: Recollections from a 103-year-old,” published in 2017.