How Rose Hacker Became a U.K. Columnist at the Age of 100

By: Dave Astor How does one get to start a newspaper column at age 100? In Rose Hacker's case, being a great public speaker was the key.

When Hacker addressed a London event commemorating the victims of U.S. atomic bombs in Japan, Camden New Journal editor Eric Gordon was in the audience.

"Unaided, and without notes, she stood at the microphone and spoke, extremely articulately, in whole sentences, for five or six minutes. I was bowled over," Gordon recalled in an e-mail interview with E&P. So the London newspaperman offered Hacker a column.

Hacker apparently had never worked as a journalist before, but had been an author. "In the '50s, she wrote daring books on sex education, and one of them, in paperback, was a best-seller," said Gordon. He added that Hacker has also worked as a marriage counselor, held public office in the education sphere, and, in her mid-90s, taught dance classes. The Camden New Journal has run several stories about Hacker in recent years.

So far, Hacker has written one piece for the newspaper -- about the threat of world war and the British media's partial reporting on nuclear proliferation. "She dictated her first column to a friend who took it down on a laptop, and then e-mailed it to this office," said Gordon. "She is, fortunately, in good health, and will continue to write her column for a long time ahead.

"To give you an idea as to her state of body and mind, when I first went to her quarters, a studio flat in an old people's residential home, she gave me lunch and insisted on having a glass or two of red wine. It was too early in the day for me to have more than a small glass of wine!"

Hacker, who could not immediately be reached for comment, will write her column every two weeks.

Is Hacker the oldest columnist in the world? It's hard to know for sure. Gordon mentioned that W.F. Deedes of London's Daily Telegraph is among the oldest, but he's only in his 90s.