World’s Oldest Man, Alexander Imich, Dies at 111

One month after receiving the title, the world’s oldest man has died. Alexander Imich, the oldest male supercentarian—a person over 110—died yesterday on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at the age of 111, the New York Times reports.

In an interview with the Times in May, Imich attributed his longevity to his genes, not having any children, and a lifetime of exercise (plus chicken soup). Imich willed his body to Mount Sinai Medical Center for study.

Imich was born to a secular Jewish family on February 4, 1903 in Czestochowa in southern Poland. He studied chemistry at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and in the 1930s he became interested in the supernatural (an anthology that he edited, Incredible Tales of the Paranormal, was published in 1995). After the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939, Imich and his wife fled to Soviet-occupied Bialystok, where they were sent to a Soviet labor camp. After moving to Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan, and then back to Poland, Imich and his wife immigrated to Waterbury, Connecticut in 1951, where they lived until she died in 1986. Imich then moved into his wife’s former office in Manhattan; eight years later, the building was turned into the Esplanade, a luxury senior residence, where he spent the remainder of his life.

Imich assumed the title—and the Guinness World Record—of the world’s oldest man when the previous record-holder, Arturo Licata, died on April 24 at 111 years and 357 days.

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