The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Mila Mangold, 114, was California's oldest resident
Over 114 years — a time that saw the United States evolve from horseand-buggy commutes to its first space tourism flights — Mila Mangold never took for granted her front-row seat to the world’s most historic moments.
“She saw so much of the history of this country,” said her son, Donald Mangold. “She was very proud to be an American.”
Then again, almost no one in California could claim to have seen more.
Mangold, a longtime Berkeley resident who held the title of California’s oldest person, died July 2 at the age of 114, her son confirmed Wednesday. She held the title for a little more than a year, having been born about three months before a Mendocino County woman who now bears that honor, said Robert Young, who leads the Supercentenarian Research and Database
Division of the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group.
Mangold, who had most recently been living in an El Cerrito assisted living center, was the secondoldest person in the country and the seventh-oldest in the world, Young said. And as such, she bore witness to two world wars, two global pandemics a century apart and the proliferation of technology that, when she was born, had yet to be dreamed of by science fiction writers in Hollywood.
Then again, a movie wouldn’t be filmed from start to finish in Hollywood for another three years.
“She was very much aware the country had passed through a lot,” Donald Mangold said. “She was very happy that the country held together even through the tumultuous times.”
Born in a quaint Nebraska home on Nov. 14, 1907, a couple of days before nearby Oklahoma became a state, Mila Mangold
was the secondyoungest of four siblings in a family whose parents had recently immigrated from Prague in what is now the Czech Republic.
It was there in Wilber, Nebraska, that she watched trains of doughboys — a nickname for American soldiers in World War I — roll through town on their way to warships waiting on the East Coast bound for Europe.
And it was in Nebraska that she caught a sobering glimpse of life amid a pandemic as the Spanish flu of 1918 spread across the world. She watched in sadness and fear as her neighbors across the street succumbed to the virus, which also appeared to sicken her mother.
“It made an impression on her,” said Donald Mangold, recalling Mila Mangold’s wonder at how the flu managed to make its way to their rural community. “It shows how significant the flu was at that time.”
Her family moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s and soon after settled in Berkeley. It was there she met her future husband, Walter Mangold, a socalled “sanitarian” who became a pioneering figure in the field of environmental and public health. He died in 1978 and his name graces the annual award for environmental health work by the National
Environmental Health Association.
Mila Mangold worked as his secretary for many years until transitioning into a homemaker with the birth of her only child, Donald, in 1945. She is survived by him and his three children.
For all those years, Mila Mangold exuded a form of kinetic energy that, rather than wear her down, appeared to extend her life longer than almost anyone in the state’s recorded history.
At the age of 90, she strayed away from her family and convinced a guide to allow her to walk up the Great Wall of China. She drove the same car — a classic, light-blue 1960 Ford Falcon — until the age of 95. And she largely eschewed the help of a wheelchair until just a few years ago.
She often espoused the benefits of exercise — walking and upside-down sit-ups were among her favorite activities.
But Donald Mangold found that the greatest elixir of youth appeared to be her effervescent mind and unyielding sense of curiosity. It’s a lesson, he said, that others can take as they strive to match her impressive longevity.
“She was always inquisitive,” Donald Mangold said. “And even though she was a homemaker and stayed at home, she still was interested in things.
“She wanted to walk up the Great Wall because she wanted to see what it was like up there. She was not someone who just lived a self-enclosed life. She liked to get out, be with people and see new things.”