“The last one in is a rotten egg!” Or so the expression goes. But what if the egg is 72 years old and is still not rotten?
“That’s odd for an egg,” observed Mary Foss Starn, herself a well-preserved 92-year-old from Mason City.
It seems that 72 years ago, while working at a Forest City egg farm, she wrote on one of the eggs, “Mary Foss, Forest City, Iowa. Whoever gets this egg, please write.” Of course, nobody would do such a thing these days for fear some egg-obsessed lunatic would track her down and camp out under her lilac tree. But what actually happened was that a man bought Mary’s penpal-invitation egg at a grocery store in New York City. He tried unsuccessfully to contact her and ended up keeping the egg (unrefrigerated!) for 50 years.
Then, 22 years ago, the egg’s owner passed it to his neighbor, John Amalfitano who recently decided to post the notice on Facebook. It went viral and as luck would have it, Mary’s daughter saw it and let Amalfitano know that Mary was now living in Mason City, Iowa.
When Amalfitano returned Mary’s egg to her, they had a laugh about what good condition the 72-year-old egg was in. “And the egg is still inside,” he told KCCI News. “It was never drained, like I said. It’s still got a little weight to it. It’s just like frozen in time.”
In fact, Mary’s egg seems to have defied all the odds. Iowa produces around 16.5 billion eggs a year and out of all the eggs from Iowa and elsewhere, this one with a return address was saved. And, unlike virtually every other unrefrigerated egg, it didn’t spoil and explode. It’s kind of a miracle.
Unlike Mary’s naturally preserved egg, Roger Bennatti’s 46-year-old Twinkie is a miracle of modern science. Bennatti was a chemistry professor at George Stevens Academy in Maine who, illustrating the power of food preservatives, set an unwrapped Twinkie on his blackboard so his students could observe how long it would take before it decayed. But it never did. Bennatti has since retired but his Twinkie lives on in a glass box at the academy, a little dusty but otherwise apparently still edible.
Vladimir Lenin may not look as pristine as Bennatti’s Twinkie but pretty good for a guy who died in 1924. Lenin is known as the founder of Soviet Russia and every year some 2.5 million tourists file past the glass sarcophagus in Red Square to get a look at his remarkably well-preserved corpse. The viewing was originally supposed to be temporary but was so popular, the government had Russia’s top scientists carefully re-embalmed the body every 18 months at the “Lenin Lab” beneath the viewing room to keep him looking his best.
It’s funny how things work out. If Mary Foss hadn’t written her address on that egg, it would never have reached the man from New York who tried and tried to find her and kept her egg with him all his life as if waiting for it to hatch. And she would never have met the kindly Mr. Almafitano who reassured her that her playful invitation for a friend so many years ago had not gone unanswered after all. And finally, she would never have known that out of all the eggs she might have chosen from the Forest City egg farm, the one she picked would be immortal.
Living in Iowa: An egg, an invitation and a happy ending
September 7, 2023