Now 100, identical Indiana twins look back

Curtis and Curran Carter sit in the dining room of Curran's Newburgh, Ind., apartment, their conversation bouncing from heat waves, big snows and milking cows before school to cars, fishing and late-night talk show host Jay Leno.

Leno, you see, had asked one of this country's oldest sets of male identical twins to appear on his show a while back, after they'd given up driving.

They turned him down.

"He'll do anything to make his crowd laugh. We didn't want to be the goat" of jokes, Curtis said.

The twins were born 100 years ago, on Aug. 29, 1908 on a Warrick County, Ind. farm.

Peter and Philip Bellico of Enfield, Conn., turned 100 in July and another pair of male twins who live in Nevada and New Jersey could be 104, according to the Web site twinstuff.com, although it points out it "hasn't received an update on them in 10 months."

Their ranking in the world of twins doesn't seem to matter to the Carters. The conversation turns to what Curran calls "the big heat wave of 1936," five years before the family farm got electricity in 1941.

"It got up to 108, a record that still stands," Curran recalls. "We slept upstairs in the old farmhouse. You'd sweat yourself to death, so we took a quilt out under a shade tree and laid down, an old shepherd dog between us. We slept out there about five nights, didn't we, Curtis?"

There also was the flood of '37, and the big snowstorm of 1918, which dumped 41 inches of snow plus ice and sleet that January.

The brothers ice-skated to the one-room school they attended.

"We drove when we were 9," Curran continues. "When dad was busy on the farm and mom wanted to go visit her mother, we'd get dad's old (Model T) out. We couldn't reach the pedals sitting down, so we'd drive it standing up"

In addition to the predictable "good clean living and hard work," Curtis has another reason for their longevity: "It's also your attitude toward life. You have to look forward to things to keep you here."

At age 14, using the 50 cents a day they earned from odd jobs and money their grandfather had given them on their 5th birthday, they bought a 1922 Ford Roadster. It replaced a team of oxen and made them an immediate hit with the girls.

"People didn't know what a driver's license was back then," chuckles Curtis.

According to Curran's daughter, Myrna Porter, her dad and uncle always had an uncanny knack for identical experiences.

Even when they both had colon cancer in their 90s, "it was in the exact same spot," she says.

Growing up, they played at barn dances (Curtis on violin, Curran on guitar) and at 27 got married in a double-ring ceremony.

Both are widowed. Curtis was married to Frances for 65 years, Curran to Thelma for 70 years.

Both men have two daughters.

As young men, the Carter twins bought Warrick County farms a mile apart and were hired on at the Evansville, Ind. Chrysler-Plymouth plant, working there until the factory moved to St. Louis in 1959.

"Every third year, Curtis would call daddy to tell him he bought a new car, then daddy would go buy one, too," smiles Porter. "Curtis has always been the leader of the two."

So it was only natural when Curtis picked up the phone one day in 2005 and called Curran to say they should stop driving: "I told him I'd made up my mind. We're 97. If we get involved in an accident, they'll blame us on account of our age."

(Contact Rich Davis of The Evansville Courier in Indiana at davisr(at)courierpress.com.)