June 8: The World’s Oldest Man

Polish-born Alexander Imich, who was deemed the oldest man in the world by Guinness World Records, died at 111 on this date in 2014. At the time, there were sixty-six women in the world older than him, including a 116-year-old. Imich fought the Bolsheviks in Poland as a youth. He earned a Ph.D. in zoology but worked as a chemist and writer, with a strong interest in parapsychology (he published Incredible Tales of the Paranormal in 1995, when he was 92). He and his wife (who died in 1986) survived World War II by fleeing to Soviet-occupied Bialystok and then being shipped, before the Nazi takeover, to a Soviet labor camp. After losing most of their family to the Nazis, they emigrated to the U.S. in 1951. They had no children — which is one of the reasons Imich gave for his longevity.

“The compensation for dying is that I will learn all the things I was not able to learn here on Earth.” —Alexander Imich