Martin Magner's voice rumbles and clenches as he relives a night more than six decades old.
For a moment, he is not a 101-year-old man living at Sunset Hall, a Los Angeles group home. He is a young man in Germany who has directed a controversial reworking of George Bernard Shaw's "Too Good to Be True," only to come face-to-face with the legendarily difficult playwright on opening night.
His torso jolts forward at the remembered thud of Shaw's hand descending on his shoulder. His face mirrors terror, then jubilation, as Shaw's voice echoes through his mind, proclaiming the staging a triumph.
Then the memory passes and he is back at Sunset Hall, in his wheelchair, in a present that has outlasted all of his expectations.
According to newly released 2000 census information, there are now more than 51,000 Americans who, like Magner, are 100 or older, among them about 1,400 so-called super-centenarians who top 110.
Even the Census Bureau says the numbers are probably inaccurate, mingling human error with equally human wishful thinking. Yet, flawed as the figures are, they hold a kernel of truth: With each generation of healthier and longer-lived Americans, the romanticism of living to 100 is giving way to the reality.
"It scares me and it makes me proud," said Lori Ferris, great-granddaughter of Maud Farris-Luse, a 114-year-old Coldwater, Mich., woman who may be the world's oldest person. "You hear about these people who let go of life and I wish I knew what keeps her going."
Centenarians have always embodied the hope that someday the human life span will punch through mortality's ceiling, a magnetic notion that in some ways has undermined efforts to accurately count this population.
Myths abound about wizened Native American elders and yogurt-eating Russian peasants who defied death to live past 120, 130, even 150.
There are 228 people listed--probably in error--in the Social Security Administration's files as dying at ages in excess of 150, said Louis Epstein, who maintains a global tally of about 225 super-centenarians verified and tracked by a volunteer network of hobbyists.
A handful of centenarians have appeared on every census going back to the mid-1800s, but agency statisticians largely ignored the category as too small to matter. Then came the 1970 count, when, amid waves of publicity about health fads and miracle drugs, 106,000 Americans reported they were 100 or older.
