The holiday honoring your parents’ parents falls on September 10. Here’s a look at some older folks who’ve made the news in some very quirky ways.
Model Grandpa
The fashion designer known professionally as Ms. Lv is a top up-and-comer in Chinese haute couture. But sales and attention really started growing after Ms. Lv’s fashion house hired a model with a unique sensibility: 72-year-old Liu Xianping. He’s Ms. Lv’s grandfather, and he models all of the clothes, not minding too much that the clothes are designed for girls and young women. “It’s helping my granddaughter,” he told Newsweek.
Shredded Grandpa
Just because you get older doesn’t necessarily mean you get weaker. Take Jim Arrington of Sacramento, California, for example, who could probably take on anybody in a fight. At 84 years old, he’s been bodybuilding for seven decades, having won 16 out the 62 competitions he’s entered. Arrington is also in the 2018 edition of Guinness World Records as the oldest active male bodybuilder ever. How does he do it? He works out constantly, eats a high protein diet. What also helps: “You need to set goals, but most of all, you need to love the training,” Arrington says.
Hero Grandpa
In the summer of the 2017, a three-year-old boy (name not released in media reports) fell into a well in the small, northeastern Texas town of Van. It was full of water but out of use, covered with a concrete cover. It had evidently degraded over the years…because the toddler fell right through it, 30 feet into the water below. Luckily, his grandfather was with him. The man (name not released) took it upon himself to crawl down into the well, retrieve his boy, and climb back down. By the time firefighters had arrived on the scene, both guys were out of the well and doing fine and didn’t need any help.
Zombie Grandpa
In 2016, 74-year-old Miguel De Luna snuck out of his nursing home in western Mexico to go out drinking. After a few months of searching, police found a body they believed to be De Luna. His family identified it as such, held a funeral, cremated his remains, and grieved their beloved father grandfather. But then, two months after the funeral, the family discovered that the ashes they had were not those of De Luna…when he showed up at the family home. He was a little worse for the wear, with bandages wrapped around his head to cover a wound sustained during his time spent wandering around. “They thought I was dead,” De Luna said, “but I just walk and walk.”