By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS & JONAH RASKIN
If there’s a secret to a good long life, local centenarians Ron Kay and Arthur Roth may have found it. They are, at least, both living it.
Roth, who celebrated his 100th birthday on November 16, lives on Post Street at The Carlisle retirement home. Kay, who turned 100 last year, lives across the street at The Sequoias.
“Few individuals do better isolated.”
Ron Kay’s early years were, despite some happy memories, hardly the good life. Born in 1923 in Heidelberg, Germany, into a middle-class Jewish family, he came into a world with antisemitic stirrings that would explode into the beginning of the Third Reich a decade later. Education for Jewish children ended at age 14. “It was a way to get free labor,” he says. He went to work as an unpaid apprentice to a local electrician. At 16 he would be of age to be sent to a concentration camp, so his parents managed to get him to England. His English foster family introduced him as Heinz, an abbreviation of his given name, Heinrich. Kay looked through the phone book, decided he liked the sound of “Ron,” and renamed himself.
In time, he made his way to an uncle in San Francisco. “He never had kids,” Kay says, “so it didn’t occur to him to send me to school.” Instead, young Ron went to work in a sheet metal shop, a job that soon cost him the tips of four fingers.
It was his fluency in German and English that finally lifted Ron Kay permanently out of manual labor and into a distinguished career in computers. While still a teenager, he found a job as a translator at UC Berkeley. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he was tested for a number of schools and chose the one that lasted the longest, hoping to delay the inevitable and learn as much as he could. Army Air Force school took him back to England. By the end of the war, Kay was translating German rocket scientists for U.S. intelligence.
Back in Berkeley, and now an American citizen, he knew he wanted to be an engineer and was excited to discover he could study for a degree that might also include classes in such diverse areas as Shakespeare and philosophy. Despite never having set foot in a high school, he graduated from UC Berkeley as a physicist at the dawn of the computer age. In a 25-year career with IBM he went from hardware to software and to recognition in his field.
Kay met his future wife Renate at a wedding in Oakland. They shared a love of books, music and culture, and raised three children. After living in several places in the Bay Area, they retired to a two-bedroom apartment at The Sequoias in 2013. After she died a few years later, he moved up to a studio apartment on the 24th floor with sweeping views from the Golden Gate Bridge to the East Bay hills.
He says common sense and strong family bonds are the key to successful aging. “Achievement of academic goals can be pretty empty stuff,” Kay says. Nevertheless, he’s still learning, and recently delivered a talk to his fellow Sequoians on artificial intelligence.
“Peace of mind,” he says, “comes from the acceptance of the limits of our understanding. For many people, religion is the preferred alternative.”
“Sociability and exercise — those are the essentials.”
Arthur Roth celebrated his 100th birthday on November 16 across the street from Kay in The Carlisle. Looking back on his long life, Roth first recalls being a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War II. For his bravery in combat he was awarded a Bronze Star. What he remembers most, though, is not his own bravery but the heroism of others ready to sacrifice their own lives to save their fellow soldiers, including him.
“I remember the exhilaration of victory and the warm welcome for the brave soldiers disgorged by the army,” he says. “My memory isn’t too bad for a guy who’s 100.”
Born in Manhattan and reared in New Jersey, Roth came west after the war and has lived in California ever since. He achieved renown as the head of the advertising department at Levi Strauss when the whole world wanted Levi’s jeans. “They were associated with the extraordinary myth of the American West,” Roth says. “The world couldn’t get enough Levi’s.” He had the good fortune, he says, to “open the entire market for jeans east of the Mississippi River.”
Roth and his wife Lois moved to The Carlisle a decade ago. Their son Adam and his family often visit. Roth attributes his long life to the love of — and from — family and friends. That and exercise. “Sociability and exercise,” he says. “Those are the two essentials.”
Ron Kay agrees about the value of friends and family. And he gives a nod to the senior living communities where both men are spending their final years. “Few individuals,” he says, “do better isolated than in a supportive community.”
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