JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

Charles "Hap" Fisher does a push-up with his walker Thursday at his home in Brandon Oaks retirement community.

JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

"I think people who don't work 10 hours a day are sissies," Fisher said.

At 102 years of age, Charles "Hap" Fisher believes he will not live to see his 103rd birthday in November -- if actuarial tables and statistical data for life expectancy are to be believed.

"It's just not a rational conclusion," the Roanoke scientist explains.

He is the oldest independently living resident at Brandon Oaks retirement community, the oldest alumnus of Roanoke College and very likely the oldest scholar in the nation who is still actively publishing his research.

In 1900, the average American male was expected to live just 47 years. Hap Fisher has taken the life expectancy gain of 30 years in the 20th century -- and nearly doubled it.

Even in the midst of an aging boom, only one in 10,000 people reach the centenarian mark. Healthy aging is 80 percent dependent on environment and 20 percent on genes, according to scientists at the Institute for Aging Research.

For proof, they need look no farther than Fisher, who gave up his office in the Roanoke College chemistry department -- on his 100th birthday.

And he still hasn't fully retired.

A scientific bent

"A lot of it is just luck," Fisher says, explaining the secret of his longevity.

He had the good luck to be born to parents who believed in education, though they themselves didn't graduate from high school. A fat and happy baby, they nicknamed him Hap, after the Vaudeville actor Jack "Happy Jack" Gardner.

He graduated from Salem's Andrew Lewis High School in 1924 and Roanoke College in 1928. He had gone into research chemistry -- because he was shy and preferred figuring equations over talking about them.

He had the good fortune to receive a glowing recommendation for graduate school at the University of Illinois and, later, his first teaching job -- at Harvard University.

"My parents taught me that money wasn't important, that I should live to do good in the world," he said, over a recent vegetarian lunch in the Brandon Oaks dining hall, where he kept his walker nearby and struggled to hear the questions asked of him, politely asking for a repeat.

(He's been vegetarian since the age of 10 -- when a favorite pet chicken showed up, roasted, on his parents' dinner table.)

When DuPont chemical company caught wind of his work, they courted him vigorously. But Fisher went to work for the government instead because he believed it puts the interests of citizens ahead of the bottom line.

He worked on coal-to-gasoline conversion for the U.S. Bureau of Mines then spent the bulk of his career in New Orleans, where he ran the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Southern Regional Research Center.

He developed a synthetic rubber that helped provide tires for military vehicles during World War II. He worked on the technology that turned coal into gasoline, and figured out ways to make cotton fabric sturdy, fireproof and waterproof.

If you've ever worn a skirt with pleats in it, you have Hap Fisher to thank for the fact that you didn't have to iron every single one of them out.

All told, he produced more than 200 articles and 72 patents.

"He's a very brave man," says Roanoke College chemistry professor Jack Steehler. "He's more interested in doing practical things than in philosophy or politics. His goal is to make people's lives better through science."

And although he's garnered many accolades in the field and enough money to qualify him as a top Roanoke College benefactor, the scholarships he's endowed do not bear his name.

"He's happy to be introduced at the Fisher lectures when he comes to them," adds Steehler, noting that the department named the series in his honor as well as the chemistry lab. "But we've been told not to make his introduction too long or too detailed."

Salem civic leader Cabell Brand calls Fisher "the most interesting local person I know. I learn something new every time I'm with him."

When Brand sent several friends a draft copy of his memoir with a request for feedback, Fisher sent back six handwritten pages of notes.

A work-filled life

Fisher outlived his first two wives and is now married to Betty Fisher, who is 19 years his junior. He doesn't have children, though he keeps in touch with his extended family, including a sister, 85, and a brother, 90.

He gave up driving a decade ago -- not because he couldn't do it anymore but because "I was losing my confidence, and I didn't want to kill some nice young person."

He gave up traveling soon afterward, with the stamps of more than 50 countries on his passport. The Queen Elizabeth II was his favorite mode of going abroad.

He used the passenger liner to circumnavigate the globe seven times. "I found that I could work at sea without interruption," he explains.

"I think people who don't work 10 hours a day are sissies."

He still reads voraciously -- scholarly journals and magazines mainly, The Economist being his favorite.

When he indulges in a novel, he reads it in Spanish. He used to read in German and French, but says his word recall isn't what it used to be.

From a desk in his apartment, he still works every day on his research and has an article under consideration now at the Journal of the American Oil Chemists Society. It has to do with calculating surface tension of organic chemical solvents.

Or something like that.

Scanning the latest work of laboratory scientists, he collates their results and organizes them into equations that can then be used by industry to develop new goods.

He has no interest in learning computers, but he keeps his Hewlett-Packard calculator handy when he creates his formulas, which he then stuffs into large manila envelopes and mails to the chemistry department secretary at Roanoke College, who types the work up and sends it off.

To keep his body as strong and limber as possible, he does squats while holding onto the kitchen sink and lifts his walker, dumbbell-style, over his head.

Asked if he swims, he grins and says, "That would be logically a good thing for me to do, but I'm sorry to say I don't."

His long life is a credit to the wonders of technology, he says, citing his dependence on cataract surgery, hearing aids and a pacemaker.

"I don't believe in God, but I do believe in knowledge and logic. I'm not always knowledgeable and logical, but I try to be informed."

Fisher says he's not afraid of dying, though he wouldn't mind living long enough to see a stock market rebound. "There comes a time when you're supposed to die. When it's my time, I say let's die and get it over with."

He'd still like to write a book -- something about synthetic liquid fuels and energy -- but he knows it would take time.

"And excuse me," he said, grinning. "But I don't think that, logically speaking, I have that much time."