MOSCOW, September 15 (RIA Novosti) – Salustiano Sanchez-Blazquez, recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s oldest man, has died, according to US media reports.
Sanchez-Blazquez, a self-taught musician and coal miner, died Friday at a nursing home in Grand Island, New York, at the age of 112, the Associated Press reported citing a senior gerontology consultant with the Guinness World Records.
Nicknamed "Shorty," Sanchez-Blazquez became the world’s oldest man when Japanese citizen Jiroemon Kimura died on June 12 at the age of 116.
Born in 1901, in the Spanish village of El Tejado de Bejar, Sanchez-Blazquez moved to Cuba at the age of 17. In 1920, he came to the United States, where he worked in the coal mines, in construction and in the industrial furnaces.
Sanchez-Blazquez had two children, seven grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.
Italy’s Arturo Licata, 111, is now the leading candidate to be officially recognized by Guinness as the world's oldest living man. The oldest living person in the world is a woman, 115-year-old Misao Okawa of Japan.
