A Western New Yorker has officially been named the world's oldest man at the age of 112, the New York Daily News reports.
Salustiano Sanchez-Blazquez of Grand Island, New York, is a self-taught musician, coal miner and gin rummy aficionado, and according to Guinness World Records Ltd., he now has the title of "world's oldest man" under his belt as well.
Sanchez-Blazquez became the world's oldest man when 116-year old Jiroemon Kimura died on June 12 this year. In order to locate the world's oldest people on record, the Guinness World Records uses immigration papers, marriage records and news reports.
Though Sanchez-Blazquez is the oldest living man, the title of "oldest living person" belongs to American Besse Cooper of Georgia, who celebrated her 116th birthday (Sweet 116!) last year with family and friends.
"The older she has gotten the more wittier she has gotten," Cooper's third child, Sidney, said to the Walton Tribune at the time. Cooper was the eighth person in the world and the fourth American to have been verified to reach the age of 116.
Senior gerontology consultant with Guinness World Records told the New York Daily News that 90 percent of all supercentenarians are female, and currently Sanchez-Blazquez is the only man with proof to confirm that he was in fact born on June 8, 1901, in village of El Tejado de Bejar, Spain.
Known for his musical talent on the dulzania, a double-reed wind instrument he taught himself to play and used to perform at local weddings, Sanchez-Blazquez moved to Cuba at the age of 17 with his brother Pedro, where they worked in the cane fields.
In 1920, he immigrated to the U.S. via Ellis Island and worked in the coal mines of Lynch, Kentucky. He later moved to the Niagara Falls area of New York where he met and married his wife, Pearl, in 1934, and has lived every since. Earning the nickname "Shorty," he worked in construction and the financial industries for many years, and said that while he feels humbled by all of the attention towards his age, he doesn't feel he's truly accomplished simply by outliving most.
"He says, 'I'm an old man and let's leave it at that,'" his daughter, 69-year-old Irene Johnson, told the New York Daily News. Sanchez-Blazquez lived with Johnson in Grand Island after his wife died in 1988 before being moved to a nursing home in 2007.
"We did our best," Johnson said of the years she spent living with her father following her mother's death. "We weren't going to put him somewhere just because he was old."
As for how he achieved his longevity, "Shorty" chalks it up to eating one banana a day and taking his six daily tablets of Anacin, though his daughter has a different idea.
"I think it's just because he's an independent, stubborn man," she said. Sanchez-Blazquez also has a 76-year old son named John, seven grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.
The oldest person to ever have lived and been authenticated was Jeanne Louise Calment, who died at the age of 122 years and 164 days in France.
Click here to see a photo of Salustiano "Shorty" Sanchez-Blazquez, the world's oldest living man on record.
