Sarah Knauss, The Oldest American To Ever Live
USCSarah Knauss was “unfazed” by the attention she received as the oldest woman in the world in the late 1990s.
Sarah Knauss lived a quiet existence — for an impressively long time. When she died on December 30, 1999 at the age of 119 years and 97 days (just 10 days short of Tanaka’s record), Knauss was the oldest verified person in the world and still holds a record today as the oldest American to ever live.
“Sarah was an elegant lady and worthy of all the honor and adulation she has received,” said Joseph Hess, an administrator at the nursing home where Knauss died.
Worthy, perhaps, but Knauss herself was not particularly impressed by it. The Los Angeles Times reports that when Knauss learned that she was the oldest person alive in 1998, she responded: “So what?”
Public DomainSarah Knauss in 1897, at the age of 17.
“She’s a very tranquil person and nothing fazes her,” Knauss’ daughter, then in her 90s, confirmed. “That’s why she’s living this long.”
Born in 1880 in Pennsylvania, Knauss spent her life out of the spotlight as a homemaker and an insurance office manager. Her passions, according to the Los Angeles Times, included: “watching golf on television, doing needlepoint, and nibbling on milk chocolate turtles, cashews and potato chips.”
Like many people who lived well beyond the age of 100, Sarah Knauss was asked how she enjoyed her long life. In 1995, she replied succinctly: “I enjoy it because I have my health and I can do things.”
Lucile Randon, The French Nun Who Lived To 118
Abaca Press/Alamy Stock PhotoLucile Randon survived both World Wars and the COVID-19 pandemic before she died at the age of 118 in 2023.
Like her French compatriot, Jeanne Calment, Lucile Randon lived to be well over 100 years old. Unlike Calment, who lived something of a charmed life, Randon knew many days of despair during her 118 years on Earth.
“I’ve had plenty of unhappiness in life,” Randon told French radio in 2020. “[D]uring the 1914-1918 war when I was a child, I suffered like everyone else.”
Randon was born in France in 1904 and grew up with brothers whom she adored. Indeed, she told AFP that one of the happiest days of her life was when two of her brothers came home alive from World War I.
“It was rare, in families, there were usually two dead rather than two alive. They both came back,” she explained.
Public DomainLucile Randon as a child in the early 1900s.
After the war, Randon converted to Catholicism, and in 1944, she joined the Daughters of Charity to become a nun. According to the Washington Post, Randon paid homage to her brother André with her choice of name: Sister André. She spent decades caring for the sick before her retirement.
When COVID-19 ravaged the nursing home where she lived in her later years, Randon fell ill — and soon afterward, she became the oldest person to ever recover from coronavirus — but told reporters that she wasn’t afraid to die.
“No, I wasn’t scared because I wasn’t scared to die,” Randon told a French reporter. “I’m happy to be with you, but I would wish to be somewhere else — join my big brother and my grandfather and my grandmother.”
She died peacefully in her sleep in 2023. As for her secret to a long life? Randon claimed that she had no idea. “Only the good Lord knows,” she said.
