Tinto Falls Mayor Vito Perillo turned 100 on Sunday and is likely to be the only centenarian mayor in the nation; he reached that milestone on National Centenarian’s Day.
He was born in 1924, 43 days before Calvin Coolidge was elected president, and served in World War II.
When he was elected mayor in 2017, Perillo was a 93-year-old retired civil engineer. He ousted incumbent Gerald Turning by 197 votes, 53%-37% in a non-partisan municipal election.
At age 97, voters re-elected Perillo to a second four-year term; he won 38% of the vote in a four-candidate field, outpolling his nearest opponent by four points and 289 votes.
Now, Perillo must decide if he’ll seek re-election again in 2025 when he’s 101.
Centenarian politicians are rare, but it happens: Strom Thurmond spent his 100th birthday in the U.S. Senate,
New Jersey now has the oldest living former U.S. Senator, 94-year-old Nicholas Brady, and the oldest living former congressman, Frank Guarini, who turned 100 last month. Brady left the Senate in 1982, and Guarini ended his fourteen-year stint in the House in January 1993.
For Perillo’s first six years in office, he was the second-oldest elected official in New Jersey.
Millie Sheppard won an Ocean Gate Borough Council seat in 2020 at age 96 and served one three-year term. She left office on January 1 of this year and died on July 1, three days after she turned 100.
One of New Jersey’s youngest elected officials, 18-year-old Brielle school board member Liam Starkey, is also a Monmouth County elected official. Starkey, who recently graduated from Manasquan High School, won a seat on the Brielle Board of Education last November as a write-in candidate at age 17. By the time he assumed the role, he had turned 18 and was eligible.