When Washington Post deputy editor David Von Drehle first met Charlie White, his neighbour, White was in his driveway in trunks, bare-chested, washing his girlfriend's car with the garden hose.
At the time White was 102 years old.
By any standard, White lived an eventful life. He was born in the days of horse-drawn carriages, before radio and moving pictures and penicillin and lived to be 109.
White knew tragedy, adventure, great love and possibly the deceptively simple secrets to a long and meaningful life or what Von Drehle calls, “the operating code for a happy life.”
Photo: AFP/Simon Schuster
He has written a book, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man, describing his friendship with White.
He has just moved into his new house with his family when he met White, he says.
“One Sunday morning, in August 2007, I went outside to get the newspaper and I looked up from my driveway to see that just across the street, my new neighbour was in his driveway, just a pair of swim trunks on, bare-chested, muscular and hearty, washing his girlfriend's car with the garden hose, and a soapy sponge.
“He waved to me. And the thing about it was he had just celebrated his 102nd birthday.”
At that moment he thought; “this is someone I need to get to know.”
Given White’s age when they met, it was a remarkably long friendship, he says.
“When you meet somebody who's 102, you don't think you're going to be starting a long friendship. But in my case, I got to know, Charlie, and we were friends for seven years.”
White had a simple explanation for his long life, he says.
“Luck; he had no illusions. Charlie was a doctor himself. He was a physician, he understood how the body works and how it stops working. And he knew that he had gotten very lucky in terms of his genome, he didn't have any lurking diseases. He didn't pick up cancers in middle age.
“He also was very fortunate in terms of avoiding the kinds of accidents that can shorten lives along the way, and indeed, shortened his father's life.
“His father was killed at 42 in a freak accident when Charlie was just eight years old.”
Although long-lived and healthy himself, his life was touched by death and disease, Von Drehle says.
“Charlie buried two wives, he buried a stepdaughter, who died early of cancer right before Charlie turned 102.
“And he understood that it was nothing that his stepdaughter had done wrong and nothing that he had done particularly right. But that was just the luck of the draw.”
Making life count was the key, White told Von Drehle.
“How to make it oneself useful, well-adjusted, no matter how long your life is, I think he understood that the length of a life is not as important as its depth and its breadth.”
White's career as a doctor was upended by medical advances, he says.
“He was trained at a time when doctors really couldn't cure anything. They could treat injuries, they could set bones, they could lance boils, this sort of thing. But they really didn't have good cures for diseases, because antibiotics and other anti-microbials hadn't been developed yet.
“And so, they were more like wellness coaches, almost grief counsellors, their skill was what came to be known as the bedside manner; how well they could make patients feel confident and comfortable, while natural immunity was either winning or losing the battle for life.”
That career path he was on was destroyed during World War II when penicillin was developed, and medicine became a matter of specialities, Von Drehle says.
“Charlie pivoted, got training as an anaesthesiologist, one of the first in the United States to be licensed in that new speciality, and went on to a second great career as one of Kansas City's leading anesthesiologists.
“So [he had] that adaptability, that willingness to make a friend out of change, instead of being paralysed by seeing what you know become obsolete.”
He was a surgical innovator as well, Von Drehle says.
“Another of the techniques that was developed in the war was the idea that you could operate on the heart, that the heart was a muscle that you could cut into reach in there and maybe remove pieces of shrapnel and save the lives of injured soldiers.
“After the war, surgeons began to think of different heart ailments that could be treated as well. And one of them Charlie and his friends on a surgery team decided they wanted to try in Kansas City.”
The problem was there was no such thing as a heart-lung machine and so a patient could bleed out, but White had an idea to slow the flow of blood by lowering body temperature.
“He was out at his farm where he had a couple of horses, and he noticed the big, oval tank that they kept the water in for the horses and other livestock called a horse trough.
“He realised that he could fill that with ice and put a patient inside and that would cool down the body enough to operate.”
For several years after, the leading edge of open heart surgery in Kansas City, Missouri, was Charlie White's horse trough, he says.
“It's a great rule of thumb about how when change happens, it doesn't necessarily come in one fell swoop. Oftentimes, it's a matter of taking one step at a time, being experimental' being flexible.”
It wasn’t all brilliant eureka moments, White made plenty of bad calls, he says.
“He did some skiing during World War II when he wasn't at work as the doctor. And after the war, some of his ski buddies said we're going to develop a ski resort in Colorado, you should invest with us, you should come in on this. It's good. It's gonna be in Aspen.
“And Charlie said, 'that's crazy, that's just a ghost town'.”
White lived long enough to understand the importance of simplicity, he says.
“We move into a phase of life where we simplify, and we begin to boil our experiences down to some core lessons.
“Those sound like greeting cards maybe, or Facebook memes, the things like 'find joy', 'enjoy wonder', 'do the right thing', 'be kind', 'be soft', 'sometimes take risks', 'make mistakes, learn from them'.
“Charlie wrote all these down on a sheet of paper near the end of his life, these little lessons that he had boiled his life down to.”
