114 YEARS YOUNG

CRESWELL — Heaven can wait. Delma Kollar is still here.

And according to the only group that appears to track supercentenarians — people 110 or older — only four other living human beings have been here longer.

“Here” being on the planet Earth.

Oregon’s oldest resident, Kollar turns 114 today, according to the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group, which verifies and debunks the ages of supercentenarians around the world and validates the claims for the Guinness Book of World Records.

That makes Kollar the world’s fifth- oldest documented person, and the third-oldest in the United States. And according to a Wikipedia list of the oldest people in human history, Kollar ranks 88th.

However, there is a chance Kollar is only 113 today, which would make her the 13th-oldest known person still living, according to the researchers.

Putting her age at 114 is based on handwritten U.S. Census records from 1900 and 1910 discovered online a few years ago by Gerontology Research Group analyst Robert Young of Atlanta. But there are also two Census records that indicate Kollar — who has lived at the Creswell Care Center since 2004 — was born on Oct. 31, 1898.

Young was confident enough, however, to go with the 1897 birth date because the 1900 and 1910 Census records taken in Lone Elm, Kan., where Kollar was born, say her younger sister, Nina, was born on Feb. 1, 1899.

“For 1898 to be correct, (her) father would have had to not know the difference between a child aged 1, born February 1899, and a child aged four months, born February 1900,” Young told The Register-Guard last year. “Given that the 1900 census is asked three ways (age, year of birth, month of birth), it is more reliable and is also the closest record to the birth event.”

Young said birth certificates were not issued until 1911 in the remote areas of eastern Kansas, where Kollar was born on a farm as Delma Dorothie Lowman. She was issued a birth certificate in the 1950s that says she was born in 1898, according to Kollar’s daughter, Jean Cooper of Cottage Grove.

Regardless, Kollar — who survived a heart attack in her 70s and has outlived all five of her siblings, two of her three children and both of her husbands — has entered rarefied air for humans.

The Gerontology Research Group’s list of supercentenarians still living throughout the world is currently at 82 — all but five of them females.

If Kollar was indeed born in 1897, well, here are the names of some other famous folks born that year: film director Frank Capra (died 1991), author William Faulkner (died 1962), pilot Amelia Earhart (disappeared 1937), mobster Lucky Luciano (died 1962), and playwright Thornton Wilder (died 1975).

None of those famous folks came close to lasting as long as Kollar.

“I think it’s been in the genes,” said Cooper, Kollar’s lone surviving child, who, at age 87, is literally still a kid. “That’s the only thing I can think of, really, because she’s had a lot of stresses.”

Kollar’s other two children, Bill Hoggatt and Earlene Duncan, died in their 60s, he of congestive heart failure, she of a brain tumor. But Kollar’s parents both lived into their 90s, and she had two aunts who lived past 100, according to a family history that Kollar put together years ago.

All told, Kollar has six grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren, 11 great-great-grandchildren and one great-great-great-grandchild. She spent years as a schoolteacher in Kansas and California before moving to Oregon in 1982 with her second husband, Harry Kollar, who died in 1986.

She celebrated her 100th birthday in 1998, when she still was under the impression that she was born in 1898. She still was living on her own then, in Walterville.

But of course, no one expected her to be here 13 years later. If she is still with us a year from today, she could find herself listed as the world’s oldest human being.

However, Kollar has a ways to go to challenge the all-time human longevity record, that of France’s Jeanne Calment, who was 122 when she died in 1997.

Kollar’s awareness and vitality have diminished noticeably since her birthday last year, but she still has her moments. And when you feel her pulse it seems plenty strong and perfectly normal — at about a beat a second.

“She’s definitely slowing down,” her granddaughter, Syd Bergeson, 60, of Eugene, said Thursday during a visit with her own granddaughter, 9-year-old Addy, a fourth-grader at Eugene’s Camas Ridge Elementary School.

“But she said ‘hello,’ so she has days when she comes out. But she always knows us. She’s never not known us, which I find amazing,” said Bergeson, who along with Addy and Cooper, enjoyed feeding Kollar M&Ms from a dish by her bedside.

“She’s so funny,” Bergeson said. “No matter how out of it she is, she always takes M&Ms.”

Kollar is a chocolate lover, and plans to enjoy a piece of chocolate cake today.

“I love it,” she said.

As of today, the world’s oldest person, according to the Gerontology Research Group, is Besse Cooper of Monroe, Ga., who is 115 and was born on Aug. 26, 1896.

A year ago, Cooper was the world’s third-oldest person. But since then, Eugenie Blanchard of St. Barth, France, born on Feb. 16, 1896, died at age 114 on Nov. 4, 2010, four days after Kollar’s birthday last year. And Eunice Sanborn of Jacksonville, Texas, born on July 20, 1896, died earlier this year on Jan. 31, also at age 114.

So what does Kollar, who’s been bedridden for more than two years, think of all this? Does she realize the enormous odds she has surpassed?

“How old are you going to be Monday?” Bergeson asked her grandmother.

“I haven’t hardly paid attention,” Kollar said.

“114,” Bergeson said.

“Oh, no,” Kollar said.

Mark Baker is The Register-Guard’s features editor. Reach him at 541-338-2374 or [email protected].