107-YEAR-OLD VAN NUYS MAN LIVED COLORFUL LIFE TO FULLEST.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy

The last time I ran into Mike Zele he was sitting at a table in a corner of the L.A. Breakfast Club putting his best moves on a couple of good-looking, 95-year-old widows.

That was just like Mike, hitting on younger women at a 90-plus birthday party. He called it robbing the cradle.

He didn't necessarily like doing it, Mike said, but when you're 106, you don't have much choice. There aren't many women your own age still around to ask out dancing.

"A pint of whiskey and a good woman, that's the secret," Mike was saying, as he held court with babies in their 90s interested in finding out how one goes about beating Father Time, their doctor's orders, and every insurance company's actuarial charts.

Last month, while I was out on vacation, this long party Mike called life finally came to an end at 107. He died on Christmas Eve, a day after entering the hospital with pneumonia.

I would have bet the house Mike would have checked out on a dance floor somewhere - a blonde on one arm and a shot of whiskey in the other - wringing every last ounce of life out of life.

You can't explain people like Mike Zele. You just appreciate them. Somehow, they've convinced the man upstairs to look the other way longer than he looks away for most people.

When I asked him once during our annual birthday call how it felt to be 104 years old, Mike said he couldn't really tell yet because he hadn't had any practice at it.

"But 103 wasn't too bad," he said.

Mike never got cheated. He was like that 90-year-old woman in Paris 30 years ago who cut a deal with her 47-year-old notary public.

He would pay her $500 a month for life, and, in return, her grand apartment in a small town that Vincent van Gogh once called home, would become his when she passed away.

The notary, Andre-Francois Raffray, looked at the actuarial charts on life spans 30 years ago, and figured he had a pretty good bet going. But last month, he died at age 77.

Jeanne Calment, now 120 years old and listed by the Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest person, still has her apartment, and more than $184,000 of Raffray's money on the come bet.

"In life, one sometimes makes bad deals," Calment said with a wink on her 120th birthday last year.

Yes, and in life, some people blow by normal life spans with their health and sense of humor going strong as ever.

Mike Zele was one of them. Born in the horse and buggy era, he died in cyberspace.

He arrived in the world the same year as aluminum, back in 1888 when Grover Cleveland was vacating the White House for Benjamin Harrison.

Along the way, Mike worked 16-hour days as a coal stoker on a steamer to earn his fare from Romania to the United States as a teen-ager, homesteaded in Montana and Idaho, hung out with Crow Indians on the reservations, and counted among his best drinking buddies a man named Bill Cody - Buffalo Bill Cody.

He was 40 when the stock market crash triggered the Great Depression, and he began collecting Social Security the year Harry Truman handed the country over to a man called Ike.

Mike came to the Valley back in 1927 - mistakenly dropped off in Van Nuys by a Red Car conductor who didn't understand that Mike was asking in his broken English to go to Venice.

While waiting for a Red Car out of the Valley the next day, he was offered a job planting sweet potatoes. He took it and settled in the Valley, opening his own produce stand on Saticoy Street years later.

Mike never saw Venice until friends drove him there for a surprise 101st birthday party.

At 105, Mike was taking swings at a con man who stole $37 out of his wallet after getting in Mike's Van Nuys home by pretending to be from Mike's bank.

"The guy kicked me in the knee before I had a chance to connect," Mike said. "If I was only 60 years younger, the bum would never have gotten away."

And, at 106, he was still putting the moves on 95-year-old widows.

Rest in peace, pal. You were one hell of a colorful man.