The Brink: Millie Flashman (SSW’45) Helps BU Discover the Secrets of Living to 100
As a participant in BU’s New England Centenarian Study, BU School of Social Work alum Millie Flashman (SSW’45) is helping researchers better understand what factors lead a lucky few to live to 100 and beyond. In an article for BU’s The Brink, she discussed her long life, what the BU research process has been like, and why her aging experience is unlike the average person’s.
Excerpt from “The Secrets of Living to 100” by Rich Barlow:
In 1922, the year Millie Flashman was born, doctors treated diabetes with insulin for the first time. In 1943, when she graduated from Boston University’s (now closed) College of Practical Arts & Letters, fascist Italy surrendered in the Second World War. In 1945, mere months after she got her master’s at BU’s School of Social Work, a joyful nation welcomed home returning troops from the war. In 1991, when she retired from SSW’s faculty, the Soviet Union dissolved.
Yet, when asked about the biggest change she’s seen, this witness to world-altering events says…the fridge.
‘We didn’t have refrigerators then,’ Flashman says, recalling the un-electrified, wooden icebox of her 1920s childhood and the periodic visits by the iceman, selling ice blocks for 60 or 80 cents, ‘depending on the weight.’ She’s bemused by the potency of this seemingly small-bore memory. BU researchers, by contrast, are awed by her prodigious recollection and longevity. Flashman, who lives in a fourth-floor condo at a landscaped complex outside Boston, celebrated the start of her second century with a birthday lobster roll, and she drove until the pandemic, before donating her car to a public radio station. That’s why Thomas T. Perls recruited her to BU’s New England Centenarian Study (NECS), which he has codirected since the first of its four research projects launched in 1995.”