Tony Rafty's zest for life, so evident in his more than 10,000 published sketches of politicians, sportspeople and entertainers, finally left him at 4pm on Friday, only three days shy of his 100th birthday.
The former Fairfax cartoonist, war correspondent and author of Australia's first comic strip, drew more live subjects than possibly anyone, breathing life into them, but now it has left him as he struggled to reach his century on Monday.
A private ambulance was to collect him on Saturday at noon from an eastern suburbs hospital and transport him to Danny's Seafood restaurant at La Perouse, where his family will still gather for a celebratory lunch. 
His son Andrew said: "He has been the Eveready battery rabbit all his life and although his health has deteriorated the past six months with pneumonia twice, he had such a strong will to reach 100."
Rafty kick-started the Australian comic book industry with Jimmy Rodney on Secret Service and his caricatures range from English cricketer Walter Hammond in 1936 to former politician Peter Garrett in 2010. He was the first in his craft to have his works chosen for commemorative stamps, when Australia Post selected sportsmen Victor Trumper Walter Lindrum, Sir Norman Brookes and Darby Munro for a 1981 issue.
"I have drawn more people in the world from life than anyone before or likely to be in the future, with almost all signed by the subject," he told me in a 1997 interview.
Of his Beatles sketch, he said he believed it was the only one in the world autographed by all four. "They signed photographs, but never drawings."
He had a Donald Bradman dated 1936, Frank Sedgman and Jimmy Carruthers together in the boxer's 1948 camp, Dame Mary Gilmore (1962), Harold Holt "three weeks before he drowned" in 1967 and Sir John Kerr (1985). Entertainers include Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra.
He sketched more than 250 Australian Olympians, from the 1948 London Games, which he covered, to 2000 in Sydney. His drawings of world-class golfers include a range on Jack Nicklaus.
Rafty once rescued a Sun journalist and photographer from an Indonesian jail. While in Singapore at the end of World War II, he received a cable from The Sun, saying, "Another war has started. Catch up with Sukarno."
He journeyed to Surabaya where Indonesian President Sukarno was involved in fierce fighting against Dutch and British forces.
Rafty befriended Sukarno, an art lover and convinced him to release the two men. At age 95, he returned to Surabaya where an exhibition of his work chronicling Indonesia's struggle for independence was displayed.
Rafty's wife, Shirley, the mother of their five children, died three years ago. Her death, together with that of his brother Stan, were sad memories in a bountiful life, which included the awarding of an OAM in 1991.
Stan enlisted at the outbreak of World War II, was captured at the fall of Singapore and drowned when the Japanese troop ship Rakuyo Maru was torpedoed by a US submarine on   September 12, 1944.
Tony was on a US PT boat in the same sea, unaware death had its choice of two Raftys that raging night. "Stan and I were in the same cyclone," said Tony, who was the first to interview the 96 survivors. "I still grieve for my brother."
Stan died aged 26, leaving Tony to live a whirlwind life, two for the price of one.