A Knit Little Retirement Hobby

The world’s oldest person, as of this writing, is believed to be Ethel Caterham. Born in England on August 21, 1909, she is just a few weeks away from here 116th birthday, a mark that would be impressive even for a hobbit. Most of us, it’s fair to say, won’t reach the milestone she eclipsed sixteen years ago, let alone the age she’s reached as of today. But if you do, you’ll probably want some hobbies. Per her Wikipedia entry, Caterham enjoyed playing bridge (it’s unclear if she still does), which is all fine and good — bridge is a fun game. Other people read books, garden, do puzzles, or knit sweaters.

And maybe even, you knit them for penguins. in the case of Alfred “Alfie” Date.

Let’s start with a picture.

That photo — featuring toy penguins, to be clear — comes from the Penguin Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the habitat for Little Penguins, a species of penguin native to the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. Many of the penguin use Phillip Island off the coast of Melbourne (here’s a map) as a breeding ground. In 2000, an oil spill off the coast of Phillip Island but those penguins at risk, so the Foundation came up with a way for everyone to help: penguin sweaters.

Penguins like to swim, and unfortunately, they don’t know that it’s a bad idea to swim in water covered by and oil slick. So instead of avoiding the oil, they splash around in it, getting their feathers matted with oil. Only then do the birds realize that this is a problem, so they start to clean themselves, using their beaks to remove the oil from their bodies. But of course, penguins can’t safely ingest oil — the birds end up poisoning themselves. As Snopes explains, “knitted sweaters are placed on the birds to act as a barrier to keep them from reaching their oily feathers with beaks until rescue staff can wash them clean.“

But it’s hard to get a lot of penguin-sized sweaters — you can’t just to go the store and buy them at scale. (You can probably find a few, as there are sweaters made for dolls that might fit most penguins.) So in 2013, the Penguin Foundation decided to put out a call for help. Titled “Knits for Nature,” the campaign asked people to send in designs. The Foundations selected some winners and then made the patterns available for anyone who wanted to help. Alfie Date answered the call.

Date was 107 years old at the time and had been knitting sweaters since he was a teenager. Per the New Zealand Herald, he “ began knitting in 1932 when his sister-in-law taught him how to knit a jumper for his newborn nephew.” And he had no intention of stopping. The day the Foundation put the ask out for sweaters, Date had, coincidentally, moved into an “aged-care village” (in the words of the Herald) — and he learned about the need, and got started immediately. The Herald explained:

“I think I’d been in here about 12 hours, might have been 13. The two girls (nurses) come in to me and say ‘We believe you can knit’,” Alfie said.

The 109-year-old quickly went to work, joining in hundreds of people around the world who answered the plea for jumpers.

He began creating stitch jerseys for the tiny penguins who can be poisoned by oil spills.

But Date wasn’t just an old man who liked to knit — he was Australia’s oldest living person. And this was a surprise to the Foundation. Per ABC News (US), “the foundation dubbed Date their ‘most senior little penguin jumper knitter,’ but they didn’t realize Date was also the most senior Australian citizen.” Despite earning a remaining lifetime of doing whatever his heart desired, Date decided to keep on helping out. His efforts were widely appreciate; in fact, by the time Date’s story hit newspapers around the globe, the Foundation had more sweaters than they’d need. The organization had to ask new volunteers to not bother sending in penguin sweaters.

Date passed away in 2016 at age 110, and the Foundation shared a short tribute to his efforts on their Facebook page. They’ve also carried forward the “Knits for Nature” program — and Date’s legacy — in another way. Today, if you visit the Penguin Foundation’s shop, you’ll find toy penguins like the ones above available for sale. All the sweaters are hand-knit and donated by hobbyist volunteers like Date, although most are probably not the oldest person in their country.

Bonus fact: Chinstrap penguins are native to Antarctica and some of the more southern parts of South America, and if you come across one and it’s asleep, don’t worry — it’ll almost certainly be awake soon. Per Wikipedia’s editors, this species of penguin “microsleep over 10,000 times a day and accomplish this in 4 second bouts of sleep,” allowing them to sleep, in total, for about 11 hours a day. It may not be a great idea, though; as Wikipedia’s editors further note, “Chinstrap penguins are generally considered the most aggressive and ill-tempered species of penguin.”

From the Archives: Pipe Nightmare: The bonus item talks about penguin sweaters.