When Luke Perry died, we learned for the first time that people are mortal, and since then, things have gone from bad to worse. Life is fleeting, and a fair percentage of the people reading this will die before they reach the next sentence. (Look out!)
Anyway, other people, though, go on living. In fact, they stay alive so long, it's scary.
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A Child Of A Civil War Soldier Is Still Alive And Receiving Benefits
Okay, just reading that headline, you know I'm bullshitting you. We're deep into the 21st century now, while the Civil War was in the 19th. The life expectancy back then was like 40 years, and that's before taking into account the lowered life expectancy from having to suffer through the damn Civil War. Soldiers from then could have had grandchildren with grandchildren with grandchildren with grandchildren with grandchildren alive now. But I'm not lying. A Civil War soldier named Mose Triplett had a child who's still alive today.
Triplett was just 16 when he joined the Confederate Army in 1862. Like many in his neck of North Carolina, he harbored Union sympathies, so after a couple years, he hopped the border to Tennessee and switched to the Union's Mounted Infantry. He did a bunch of dangerous stuff, took a bullet in the shoulder, and was hospitalized. But he survived the war and went on to live to 92, dying just days after a ceremony for the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg. Remember: Life expectancy is a stat all about averages, and if someone survives into adulthood, they've always had a reasonable shot of making it into old age.
was sober when he joined the Union. That wasn't a given with all soldiers.
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Records say Mose was sober when he joined the Union. That wasn't a given with all soldiers.
Mose and first wife Mary had no children, and after she died, he remarried. New wife Elida was 50 years his junior. This wasn't totally out-of-the-ordinary in those days, and if you were looking for a husband in the 1920s, you could do worse than a war hero. They had their first child, Irene, when he was 83 years old and a second child when he was 87. After Mose died, the family continued to receive his war pension -- originally, war benefits were exclusively for widows whose husbands died in combat, but they expanded to widows of all kinds and to children too. Irene Triplett still receives a Civil War pension of some $73 a month today.
Life wasn't that awesome for Irene growing up. She dropped out of school after the sixth grade, tired of being taunted about her father being a traitor to the South. She moved into a county poorhouse and went right to a nursing home from there, and then to another. The Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed that she was still alive and collecting benefits in 2017, and the last time the media checked in on her this past Thanksgiving, she was still going strong. Family have invited her to come live with them, but she says the nursing home suits her fine. It's a great place to watch TV, do crafts, and chew tobacco.
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The Original Motion Actress For Snow White Turned 100 This Year (And Is Katey Sagal's Stepmother)
Motion capture technology didn't exist all the way back in 1937, but something damn close did. As with motion capture today, animators back then relied on actual in-studio human movement to guide them. Reference models helped animation look realistic, and then some. The actors provided exaggerated movement to give the animators plenty to work with, so behind-the-scenes clips from then look more alive than today's live-action remakes.