LUCILE, PLEASE COME BACK WHERE YOU BELONG!
And so the surviving half of our 2020s version of Calment and Knauss goes down. Frenchwoman Lucile Randon was born on one humble day in February 1904, three days after the Russo-Japanese War was declared and six days before the premiere of Madame Butterfly. Raised Protestant, she converted to Catholicism in her 20s and joined a nunnery in her 40s, taking up the religious name Soeur André (Sister André) while assisting children and the elderly. She had been resident of various nursing homes since 1979, suffered a heart attack in 1995, and made media waves when she survived COVID on the cusp of her 117th birthday. The death of Kane Tanaka last April designated Randon the oldest living person, and now she becomes the first person to die aged 118. The new oldest living person is 115-year-old Spaniard María Branyas Morera, and feck it feels weird having the titleholder born in 1907. Wasn’t it just yesterday Oscar Niemeyer was a popular pool pick?
“Old habits die hard” could describe this nun’s tenacity, as well as the fact the WOP is once again a double-digit pick. She was picked by 10 teams, including joker points for perennial centenarian outfits One Century Is Enough, Madam! and Gray Panthers.
Lucile Randon (Soeur André)
11 February 1904 – 17 January 2023, aged 118
10 TEAMS (💀💀💀 3 POINTS, 🃏 (x2) 6 POINTS)