HUMAN SIDE OF Y2K NEGLECTED; ENTER Y3M CLUB.

Byline: Nat Read

I was disappointed that my mother-in-law, who was born in the 19th century, didn't quite make it to the year 2000, but 42,000 others will, and in doing so they will gain a unique honor.

Those who will be 101 years old or more on Jan. 1, 2000, will have lived in three centuries and two millennia. No human beings will be able to make a similar claim for another thousand years.

With our preoccupation over the digital side of Y2K, we have overlooked the remarkable human dimension. One of every 6,300 Americans will be a ``third century person,'' based on the Census Bureau's projections of centenarians combined with the Social Security Administration's figures for the breakdown of ages of recipients over 101.

These members of the ``Y3M Club'' (Year of the Third Millennium) have an amazing chronological landscape.

I had so hoped that my mother-in-law, Mary Fishburne Hamilton, would be among them. Despite a lifestyle of yoga, health food and meditation, she died a few months ago, just short of the 99th anniversary of her birth in 1899.

She was born into a genteel lifestyle as the daughter of a Virginia judge, later to become a congressman. She was raised among former slaves and veterans of the Civil War, a war more recent to her than the beginning of the Vietnam War is to the youth today.

Fewer than one of five seniors who make it to 95 finish the yellow brick road to the 101 mark.

Those that do make it will have lived during the terms of 17 of the nation's 41 presidents. During their lifetime, they have watched the United States triple in population and grow by 25 percent in area, with five states joining the Union.

Some 90 percent of the Y3M members will be female, the same women who came of voting age just as female citizens were allowed to vote for the first time. Even so, they were voting before American Indians became U.S. citizens.

Y3M Club members will have grown up reading about the futuristic visions of Jules Verne and then watching them fulfilled.

The lives of these centenarians will have overlapped some of the greatest industrialists and inventors of our time - Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and John D. Rockefeller.

They were alive when Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Winslow Homer, Pissarro, Rousault and Frederic Remington touched brush to canvas.

They might have crossed paths with Booker T. Washington, Chief Joseph or Geronimo. They might have attended the debuts of symphonies by Debussy, Dvorak, Grieg and Verdi. They might have bought the first editions of Kipling, Tolstoy or Mark Twain, to name a few.

The world that members of the Y3M Club were born into had no Commonwealth of Australia, no Dominion of New Zealand and no independent Ireland. Their early world had no Panama Canal, no Boy Scouts, no airplanes and no radio or television.

When they were born, humans had never stood at either pole or at the top of the planet's highest mountain.

The world of their incredible century changed more dramatically than in any lifetimes in the long march of human evolution. How I wish I could have toasted my mother-in-law on millennial midnight!

But 42,000 other families will toast their own three-century/two millennia loved ones, and I'll be lifting my glass to them.