When I was three years old I used to cry upon sight of Truman. He had a long white beard, wore a cowboy hat and one night when I was supposed to be in bed I caught a glimpse of him doing a rain-dance in the middle of my garden for all the assembled adults. Now an institution in the village I grew up in back in Italy and a few months into his 100th year on Earth, Truman tells an unimaginable tale of a life lived, from Navajo Indians to iPads….
Is it funny to tell people that you are 100 years old?
No, it doesn’t seem strange at all. It’s just the same as being 60 or 65 or 70 or 75. It doesn’t seem to make any change at all
What is your earliest memory?
One of my earliest memories is my mother’s long black hair – she was Irish, her maiden name was Connolly. She used to go to a dark part of the house and comb her hair and sparks would fly out, you know static electricity…
What was it like jumping trains and when was that?
It’s a long story. I was at Commonwealth College in Arkansas in the ‘30s and we were asked to send a delegation to the first convention of the National Miners’ Union. Five of us went but we had no money so we had to ride the rails and that was very interesting.
The most interesting thing was trying to find your buddies once you had got on the freight train and to do that you had to walk along the top of the train and then jump from carriage to carriage with both the carriages swaying. The trains were rattling along so if you fell off, you were gone…A couple of times, too, we got shot at by the detectives who protect the railroads…
What historical event had the greatest impact on your own life?
I was in Europe in 1938, just before the war started and everybody was on tenterhooks waiting for the war to start and that made a big impression on me…
You worked with the Navajo Indians on their reservation in Arizona in the ‘30s, what was that like?
We were making a survey of how the Navajos lived and how they survived, a sort of socio-economic survey of the whole Navajo tribe. We would go out with a long questionnaire and an interpreter. We would find a family and sit with them, usually in a Hogan which is a sort of round house half of timber with a curved roof with a hole in it for the fire. There was no furniture, but the Hogan was warm and there were rugs on the floor and the Navajos speak very quietly so I often used to fall asleep listening to them…
What is the best age?
The age you are…
How old were you when you got your first television?
That would have been 1947 or 1948, when I was 35/36.
You have lived through the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s etc… What was the era you felt you belonged to most? Which was the best one to live through?
The best years were the early ‘50s when I came to Italy and I was discovering all sorts of things, the language, the country…
What is the best concert you have ever been to?
What sticks in my mind is a night of Verdi opera at the Caracalla baths in Rome on a warm summer night.
What do you learn about life and the world by the time you get to 100?
I don’t know what you are meant to have learned but I know what I learned. Largely as a result of my psychology studies, I learned a lot about myself and that helped me feel more peaceful with myself, even if that sounds corny. But I’m still learning, reading books, surfing the web, playing with my iPad and iPhone…
What advice would you give to young people starting out on life?
I would say the most important thing is to try and learn more and more about yourself, very early, who you really are. The American poet, E.E.Cummings once said that the hardest thing in the world is to try to be yourself when everybody is trying to push you into something else. If young people learned more about how they are being pushed around and prevented from doing the things they want to do and who they are, then life would be better for them and easier.
words// Roisin Agnew
