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Supercentenarian Profile

Rachel Hargrave

Born:

1903-06-15

South Dakota

United States

Died:

2014-06-22

New York City, New York

United States

Rachel “Rae” Hargrave (née Stewart) was an American journalist, radio show host, and supercentenarian.

BIOGRAPHY

Rachel Hargrave was born in South Dakota, USA, on 15 June 1903. She was a lifelong atheist, despite having been raised by parents who were ministers. In the 1940s she became a journalist, and for the rest of her life she kept clippings from the Duluth, Minnesota, newspaper where she had gotten her start.

In the 1950s she hosted a radio talk show at a Washington, D.C., station, interviewing figures such as Nobel laureate John Steinbeck and former FBI agent Melvin Purvis. After moving to New York in the late 1950s, she fell in with a literary crowd that included Langston Hughes and became close friends with the novelist Marianne Hauser.

She married twice. Her first marriage, to a Texan, ended poorly. They had a daughter, but her liberal views caused a scandal, and in the divorce she lost all rights to the child. She did, however, reunite with her daughter in her 90s, when her daughter was in her 70s. Her second husband was Roger Hargrave, a university professor who had volunteered with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

By the 1960s she found herself unemployed. She reportedly shaved twenty years off her age and secured a position as an editor and writer at the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), where she remained until her mandatory retirement at “65.”

Rachel Hargrave passed away in New York City, on 22 June 2014, at the age of 111 years, 7 days.