she's 16 he is 40

Her chemistry with Coop in here was great. She worked with Cagney, too?


And Reagan, Ryan, and Zachary Scott. Lucky girl.....

In 44 years, I will post "Brad is 99"!

OK...I've read and re-read your post trying to make sense of it, and you're just going to have to clear some things up...

#1. What on EARTH are you talking about with regard to a 16 year old girl marrying a 75 year old man? That is nowhere in the plot of this movie!!

Even if that DID occur in real life (and it DID in the case of young girls marrying Civil War pensioners on both sides in the mid 20's through the early 30's), the wills of these men could be changed to fit the desires of the aforementioned men, and frequently were, with the provision made that anyone who contested it was left with NOTHING...

#2. I am FROM the eastern part of the state of Tennessee, quite close to Fentress County, where Alvin York was from, and it is a complete MYTH that by the time a girl is in her late teens that she is an "old maid." It was NOT at all a "common occurrence" for girls to be married by the early, middle, or even late (17 or 18) teens.

The MOST common time for young women to marry was in in their early twenties, although it was certainly not UNCOMMON to see 19 year old girls married. It was much more rare to see young teenage girls get married, and it was usually always to "boys" just a few years older than themselves...

My grandmother was born in 1908, and she was married for the first time at age 18. Her sister (2 years older), was first married at age 20, and her younger sisters were married (both of these long marriages) at 24, and 19 respectively.

They were ALL "from the hills," and none of them went past the 8th grade. It just wasn't done for most families - although the more affluent families sent their daughters to finishing schools and on to college - but ALL of the sisters made wonderful lives for themselves, and lived well into old age, the youngest dying at age 98 just two years ago.

#3. I've been doing genealogy for close to 25 years, and another common myth is life expectancy. You state that up until WWII, the average life expectancy was 47 years. Well, I don't know where you got your figures, but they were incorrect.

While it's true that infant mortality rates have greatly influenced these numbers well into the 20th century, the average life expectancy was almost age 50 as early as the mid 1880's, and that was in the industrialized parts of the country, where a person was FAR more likely to meet with death due to having a limb ripped off by a machine, or being run over by a street car, or being killed in an apartment fire.

Not to mention catching an incurable disease while living in a rat infested tenement. With streets that were covered in animal feces, and the drinking water was tainted with typhus.

In the rural areas and smaller towns, people lived (and had since the 1600's) into their 80's, 90's,and beyond. Having been involved in genealogy for as long as I have, I've seen it all over the country. People just think that once you got to around 35, your days were numbered, and it simply wasn't the case at all...

I mentioned my grandmother...HER grandmother was born in 1848. She was the oldest of 11 children that were "spread out" over about 25 years. She stayed at home to help take care of her mother, who was a bit "sickly," or so the story goes. She then had HER kids starting when she was 31 (late for that time period for a first child), and she had three. She lived until right after her 101st birthday. Just long enough to see my sister come into the world in 1949!

All of her siblings (except two) lived LONG lives, and all three of her kids lived into their 90's...

A lot of the relatives in that family lived long lives, starting three generations back, and I've seen it all over the country in family trees since the 16 & 1700'S...

Of course, people die at all ages, and for any number of reasons. Cancer, heart disease, young men dying during wartime (our own Civil War wiped out an ENTIRE generation in one fell swoop), what have you. Accidents, even on the farm. Murders, the list goes on...

The point I was making, is that those numbers are just that...

I don't act...I react. John Wayne