IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE at first glance that Julius Caesar Bennett is 80 years old.
The flawless skin, lack of wrinkles and the pep in his step were the first things that left me in awe upon our first meeting. Call it a testament to good genes, a good mind or simply maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but Julius is clearly a man that looks far younger than his years.
“I guess it starts with God, then genes and the fact that since I was a little boy I played every sport imaginable,” Julius said. “I’ve always been very active. Now in my old age I’m into racquetball, which I play two days a week and I go to the gym three days a week. I haven’t played racquetball in a couple of weeks because my partner was hurt. He wouldn’t listen to me when I told him to stretch. Old people we have to stretch.”
One of the things the Deltona, Florida resident, who was recently in Barbados on vacation, told EASY magazine was that what he did to maintain his health when his two daughters were small was to quit smoking.
“My daughter complained about my smoking, and in 1976 I quit smoking because of her,” he said. “Before that, I smoked and played basketball, but now I’ve been recreated through exercise.”
Julius has also been shaped by experiences he had growing up. His mother, he says, died at 93 and raised ten children, an accomplishment he is proud of, especially after revealing that she was a victim of domestic abuse from his father.
“He was an alcoholic and would come home and just beat up on his wife,” he said. “My mother told me one day he came home and she was pregnant with me and he said, ‘Who’s the father of that baby? . . . If you say it’s me, I’ll kill you’.”
Julius said his mother left his father and was on her own with eight children.
“My mother was a praying woman because that’s all she had,” Julius said. “We were on welfare so we got enough food to subsist on. My mother had a cheque every month from the government, and on the back of that cheque was a list of things you couldn’t buy like green cabbage. You could not buy butter, you could buy lard. But because of mother’s ability to stretch food, we survived. I never knew eggs could be scrambled without milk or water.
“Sometimes I would come home and my mother would give me a penny and tell me go down to the corner and play four numbers of a parlay. She would play the numbers and win four dollars and that four dollars would feed us for the next two weeks. This was the late 40s. This was the story that made me know this praying woman would pray to God, ask for some guidance and she would pick four numbers, play them and the numbers would come. The people on the corner were so busy making fun that she only had a penny to play that they didn’t have enough sense to put a nickel or a quarter on the same numbers and win five times what she did. But we were blessed by God; that’s all I can say.”
Julius, who is enjoying his retirement, now looks back on his life with a certain amount of satisfaction. After all, he’s been married twice, has raised two daughters who are now carving out their own lives and he’s enjoying his twilight years.
“I never expected to be in Florida really. It was all serendipity,” he said. “A friend of mine came down to Florida and he was staying with a friend. While at a store he met Pat, my present wife, who he knew from Philadelphia. The first thing she asked him was had he heard from me. He told her, ‘I have his phone number right here’. He calls me and we started talking and here I am. Now Pat and I have been married for six years.”
Men who are older and divorced tend to shy away from marriage or remarriage, but not Julius.
“I’ve always been anti-church because of the things I’ve seen going in church and the years of being forced to go to church. But a few years ago God sent some pain in my shoulder and I went to church,” he said laughing. “Then I became a believer. Before I was a forced-to believer, but now I’m a new believer and I wanted to live the right way before God.”
Julius was so serious about his commitment to God that he even started courses in Bible study.
“After having a couple of courses in The Bible, I can understand it now,” he said. “I can truly say that I have a complete understanding of it.”
One can say Julius is a man transformed, albeit over the course of time, and as a result of life experiences. That is especially true in terms of his stance on marriage, which he is doing for the second time.
“Marriage to me is essentially a meeting of the minds. One goes into marriage with the understanding that these external appearances are temporary and they’re going to change,” Julius said. “When you don’t have those issues like money, children, then you have to fall back on what can we talk about. There needs to be an equal exchange of ideas. I think it’s called creative tension, where you can have a discussion with someone, have it become really intense, and you exchange ideas. I think that gives you a more lasting union.”
Julius admits that he has changed a great deal since his first marriage, and he’s far more amenable and willing to compromise. When asked what he attributed his change in ideals to, he simply says, “I got old. Given a modicum of intelligence and a willingness to listen, you cannot help but grow.”
