By Cherie Howie on the NZ Herald…
Laurence Reynolds was 28 when a doctor stood at the foot of his military hospital bed in Karachi and wondered aloud if they had a suitable coffin for him.
The medical officer expecting the worst for the young Kiwi wartime doctor, who was near death with heart toxicity from the high doses of drugs treating his amoebic hepatitis, didn’t know who he was dealing with.
“He told himself he wasn’t going anywhere”, Reynolds’ son Roger said this week, after his father died of heart failure on May 17 aged 107.
Family say the centenarian, born on April 5 1915, three weeks before the first Kiwi boot landed on Gallipoli’s shores in the infamously ill-fated World War I battle, was New Zealand’s oldest man at the time of his death.
The Department of Internal Affairs wasn’t able to confirm, but according to the Gerontology Wiki website Reynolds became the oldest living man in New Zealand after 108-year-old Cantabrian Bill Mitchell died in November.
Read the full article on the NZ Herald here.
