Healthy lifestyle the key for oldest married couple

[Amelia]

Healthy lifestyle the key for oldest married couple

Saturday, July 16, 2005.

In the United States, a 105-year-old survivor of the Holocaust and his 100-year-old wife have earned the title of the world's oldest married couple.

The Guinness Book of World Records says Herbert and Magda Brown from Philadelphia in Pensylvania have a combined age of just under 206 years.

Mrs Brown says the trick to their long marriage is no drinking, no gambling, healthy food and ensuring that where she leads, her husband follows.

"He is very easy going, I am the strong one," she said. "We never argued, we just had discussions."

And they exercised together for as long as they were able. Even at the ages of 98 and 94 they were taking daily walks in the local shopping centre, their daughter Trudie Solarz said.

The couple married in Magda's native Hungary in 1930 and then moved to Austria, Herbert's homeland, where he was arrested by the Nazis for being Jewish in 1938.

Herbert was sent to the Nazi work camp at Dachau but was released after two months in return for all of the family's possessions, including the two department stores he owned.

The couple and their only daughter then fled, almost penniless, to London, and then in 1940 to New York and eventually to Philadelphia, where they both worked factory jobs sewing garments.

The high point of her marriage was the birth of her daughter, Mrs Brown said, while the low point was when Herbert was taken away by the Nazis.

In Philadelphia they had far less money than they had enjoyed from Herbert's business in pre-World War II Austria.

Life in the United States was a major economic and cultural shock but they were at least glad to be safe from the Nazi threat, said Magda.

"We were very happy to be here but it was very, very hard," she said.

"It's unbelievable that we're the longest-married couple in the world," Mrs Brown added.

-Reuters

[Dr. Shane]

Sounds like he learned the secret is saying, "Yes, dear".

[Stan]

it seems to me there is an adventist couple who have been married 80 years.