She Gave Up Smoking at the Age of 117

. . . only five years before her death.

Only five years . . . before . . .

Wait! Let's just see if I got that right. The longest lived person ever . . .

Jeane Louise Calment

Well? There it is in stunning Wikipedia black and white. And always, I kept promising myself, "Next year I'll quit." But now I figure, hey! Why push it? Why not wait till I'm 118? And while I'm at it, just maybe I can also break the record of Jeanne Louise, for the world's longest living person--still smoking!

Lucky for her, she lived during a time when a smoker was not at hazard of catching her death of pneumonia, snatching a few puffs on lunch break; driven out into the cold, the wind, the rain, sleet and snow by a cruel, sadistic society of hysterics and upight squares who refuse to face the fact of a Mademoiselle Calment!

But at the price of an extortionately taxed pack of cigarettes these days? Shoot! you'd be first driven to poverty, starvation and death, simply for trying to keep puffing so long as that darling old dame.

And what a shame! Think of the Virginia Slims ads in Life Magazine we never got to see: Jeanne Louise in art nouveau vignette, her pretty plumed hat haloed in white curlicues of a slogan blown from her own rosebud lips, "You've Come a Long Way, Baby!"

Like Jesse Ventura keeps saying, "Don't Start the Revolution Without Me."