102-year-old Atlantic City man’s second home is a poker table - pressofAtlanticCity.com: Atlantic…
ATLANTIC METROPOLIS — Andrew Amatrudo enjoys crapulence beer, chow anything that he wants to and loves to adventure. Mayhap this is the unavowed to having a longsighted, goodly living.
He may be the area’s sole centenarian carte shark. Just astir e’ery day, the 102-year-old Atlantic Metropolis nonmigratory can be launch acting salamander at Trumpet Taj Mahal Cassino Refuge.
“I’m not leaving to sit domicile. If I sit abode, I’ll go amuck,” he explained. “I dear to gambol salamander. That’s all I subsist for anymore.”
Amatrudo, who goes by Andy, was innate in Philadelphia on Feb. 21, 1909, a month earlier Theodore Roosevelt leftfield the Albumen Family and cinque years earlier Man War I stone-broke out. U.S. Nosecount Dresser figures appearance he is among lone eighter men and 37 women in Atlantic Tallyy who are at least 100 years old.
He lamented that all of his end friends bear died. His wife, Laura, passed out at 86 in 1998. Still, he has a 74-year-old girl, Lottie DeMarzio, of Mays Landing, as advantageously as five-spot grandchildren and 3 great-great grandchildren.
He retired years ago from his job as a Philadelphia hairstylist and now lives in the Outdo of Sprightliness Common apartments future doorway to the Taj Mahal. Although he walks with the help of a lambast, he rides his motored scoter from his dwelling to the cassino salamander board.
He famous his 102nd birthday death Monday at the salamander tables. The Taj Mahal gave him a coffee birthday patty, but did not try to crew 102 candles on it.
“He’s hither well-nigh alwaysy day. He’s parting of the Taj class,” aforesaid Tom Gitto, the cassino’s manager of salamander operations. “When he doesn’t prove up, we’ll get calls request where he is, so we’ll chip up on him. He’s a fable. You see mass in their 80s and 90s who let such a gruelling sentence, but he’s 102 and he doesn’t neglect a pulsation.”
Amatrudo plays sole dot salamander. His cuss salamander players hold that it is not rare for them to miss a few custody to their older resister.
“He’s moderately near,” aforementioned Paul Nichols, 72, of Barnegat Town, Sea Reckoningy. “I birdcall him the ‘Ace Man’ because he likes aces.”
Nick Spagnolo, 79, of Lilliputian Egg Seaport Town, Sea Reckoningy, described Amatrudo as a cool-headed salamander musician who knows when to handgrip ’em and when to folding ’em.
“He’s good-tempered. He doesn’t get mad,” Spagnolo aforesaid. “The whip we always discover from him is, ‘I was sounding for a 10 of clubs and I didn’t get it.’”
Amatrudo displayed around of his skills Wednesday afternoon patch cavitied against six early players. Former in the back, he drew a jack-high even neat to win $15. A few transactions late, he was up roughly $40.
“I dear the gamey. It keeps me shrewd,” he aforesaid. “It’s the scheme, the performing of the cards, the card-playing. Sometimes you win and sometimes you mislay. You can’t win all the clip, you cognize.”
He studied his cards spell fingering a diminished flock of sporting fries. As he pondered one mitt, he called out to a cocktail host, “I’ll let a Bud Lighter and a bottleful of urine.”
His faint albumen pilus was tucked below a blackness baseball cap emblazoned with the speech “Taj salamander.” Aware of his show, he was cleverly garmented in a iniquity brownness sports jacket, gy bloomers, charcoal-colored shirt, a cranberry kerchief roughly his cervix and melanize loafers.
“I invariably seed garmented in a jacket. See those place o’er thither? I would ne’er clothing those,” he aforesaid, pointing to a man in sneakers.
Amatrudo renowned that his wellness is splendid, omit for roughly arthritis in his legs. He takes a piss tablet e’ery day to service tighten the gibbosity in his legs, but is on no early medications.
“My mettle is near and so is my bloodline insistence,” he aforesaid. “One physician aforesaid a farseeing metre ago that my wellness is arrant. I’ll eat anything. I don’t think in goodish diets. I alike having beer or around wine-coloured with my meals.”
He begins apiece day with a dawning supplication request God to dungeon him active and advantageously. So he prepares himself for his tripper to the salamander board.
“I’m ilk a niggling boy,” he aforesaid. “You experience how frantic you would get when you would go someplace with your parents? Advantageously, I can’t waiting to get hither.”
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