Still Working: Morris Wilkinson, Sally Gordon, And Increasing Numbers Of Elderly
September 7, 2010
“The preparation before work each morning starts in a methodical fashion. By 6 a.m., Morris Wilkinson, a 91-year-old letter carrier, irons his postal worker uniform—a crisp, collared shirt and gray slacks—a habit he formed while in the Marines during World War II.
He enjoys a hearty breakfast of eggs or pancakes with his wife. He shines his black shoes. And he’s off to work,” arriving at a Birmingham, Alabama post office by 7 a.m. as he has for six decades.
“I’d rather work than be idle,” he said one morning before heading off on his route to deliver mail to 550 families in his white mail truck.
So began CNN’s story today taking note of the fact that across the nation, more men and women—even in their 90s and 100s—are choosing to forgo retirement and staying at their jobs longer and seeking new employment later in life. The reasons, of course, are not always voluntary.
“It’s a combination of economics and just seeing they bring a lot of value to the workplace in terms of skills and ability,” says Deborah Russell, director of workforce issues with AARP, told the network.
By 2012, nearly one-fifth of the U.S. work force will be older than 55, the AARP reported. As they prepare to retire, baby boomers likely will continue to work well beyond the traditional retirement age of 65, Russell said.
While a daily job can provide older individuals with a schedule, alleviate boredom and sometimes improve their physical health, many older people also are continuing to work to supplement their retirement savings or help provide extra money for their families.
For some, like Sally Gordon, 101, of Lincoln, Nebraska, it’s a preference. Gordon, assistant sergeant at arms for the Nebraska Legislature, was recognized in August by Experience Works as America’s Outstanding Oldest Worker for 2010. She says she likes the extra income. Besides she’s had a steady job since the 1920s and as long as the state wants to pay her to continue to work, she’ll be happy to oblige.
“I used to be a model, and now I’m a Model T,” Gordon jokes. “I hope there’s a lot of mileage left.”
See the entire CNN story @ http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/09/07/older.workers.100s.90s/index.html?hpt=C1
Nobel Winner Paul Greengard, 84, Identifies Potential Key To Halting Alzheimer’s.
September 2, 2010
Scientist Paul Greengard first became interested in Alzheimer’s twenty-five years ago when his father-in-law developed the disease. Now, the 84-year-old researcher, awarded a Noble Prize in 2000 for his work on how brain cells communicate, may have found a target for drugs that could slow or stop the progress of the now untreatable disease.
Greengard, who still works seven days a week in his Rockefeller University laboratory in New York City, recently identified a new protein that is key to the development of beta amyloid, the destructive plaque that builds up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s and is a hallmark of the disorder, according to a study published today in Nature.
“This really is a new approach,” said Dr. Paul Aisen, of the University of California, San Diego, told Gina Kolata of The New York Times. “The work is very strong, and it is very convincing.” Dr. Aisen directs a program financed by the National Institute on Aging to conduct clinical trials of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
In Greengard’s lab, when scientists knocked out a gene that produces the new protein, called γ-secretase activating protein (GSAP), mice used in the experiment developed fewer amyloid plaques. GSAP works through a mechanism involving its interactions with γ-secretase, an enzyme that chops up the amyloid precursor protein, a large molecule produced naturally in the body and found in many different types of cells.
“Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating disorder for which there are no satisfactory treatments,” says Greengard, Vincent Astor Professor and director of the Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research at Rockefeller. “Our findings reveal that γ-secretase activating protein is a potential target for a new class of anti-amyloid therapies.”
While the discovery is exciting researchers recently deflated by setbacks in the research of anti-Alzheimer’s drugs, that the finding comes out of his lab will surprise few who know Greengard, who walks to work each day with his Bermese mountain dog, Alpha.
Born in New York City in 1925, Greengard’s Jewish mother, Pearl Meister, died in childbirth. After his father’s remarriage, Greengard was raised as an Episcopalian and denied awareness of his mother’ family or his Jewish heritage, which he discovered later in life.
He used his Nobel Prize money to create the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, to honor women scientists and combat discrimination against women in science. Self-depricating, at the time he announced the prize, he said before the Nobel Prize his greatest previous prize came from winning a Boy Scout potato sack race.
During World War II, he served in the United States Navy as an electronics technician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on an early warning system against Japanese kamikaze planes. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics, but chose to pursue biophysics in graduate school because post-war physics research was focusing on nuclear weapons.
While studying for his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, a lecture by Alan Hodgkin, a Nobel Prize winner in 1963, inspired him to begin work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons.
Until now, scientists have been searching for ways to reduce amyloid-β production in Alzheimer’s patients by blocking γ-secretase, but most γ-secretase inhibitors also block the cleavage of an important immune system molecule called Notch. Notch plays a pivotal role in the development of blood-forming organs and the immune system. Earlier research by Greengard and his colleagues showed that Gleevec, a drug used to treat leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumors, successfully inhibited the ability of γ-secretase to form amyloid-β without affecting the Notch pathway.
In the new study, led by Gen He, a research associate in Greengard’s lab, the researchers showed that GSAP stimulates production of amyloid-β in cell lines, and that reducing GSAP reduces amyloid-β.
Unfortunately, the Gleevec molecule does not cross the blood-brain barrier, the gatekeeper that prevents some substances in the blood from entering the brain. Greengard, however, believes that it will be possible to design drugs that target GSAP but do not have this limitation.
“Anti-amyloid therapeutic drugs represent a valid approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease, but their inability to accumulate in the brain has limited their usefulness,” says Greengard, who is head of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience. “The development of compounds that work like Gleevec, but have the ability to pass the blood-brain barrier and target GSAP, could revolutionize the treatment of this disease.”
Warren Buffet Upgrades Forecast: Turns 80, Predicts He’ll Work Past 100
August 30, 2010
As Warren Buffet celebrates his 80th birthday today, the “Oracle of Omaha” is also applying to himself the principles that have made him a master investor.
Once again, he’s betting on intrinsic value and longevity: This time, his own.
While talk of who will succeed Buffet as the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway continues to ramp up, he has revised the outlook he offered shareholders in 2007. Back then, based on actuarial tables, he figured he’d hang around until at least 88. Now, he tells Deal Journal, “I plan to work past 100, but to do so I may have to learn to think outside the box.”
Meanwhile, Buffett’s followers say he is only getting better with age, writes Serena Ng in today’s Wall Street Journal. Because he loves his work, “Buffet has no intention of stepping down.”
The return on his investments, including taking positions in Geico, Benjamin Moore, See’s Candies, Dairy Queen, and NetJets, must make his work easy to love. An investment of just $1,000 into Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, would be worth millions today.
The relationship between his food choices and longevity is harder to figure. Well known for his love of hamburgers, Cherry Cokes, hash browns, in The Snowball he tells his biographer Alice Schroeder, “Broccoli, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts look to me like Chinese food crawling around on a plate. Cauliflower almost makes me sick. I eat carrots reluctantly. I don’t like sweet potatoes. I don’t even want to be close to a rhubarb, it makes me retch.”
But last year, he said he had reformed. In answer to the advice from a New Jersey nutritional dentist who encouraged him to eat more healthy food and take nutritional supplements, he claimed in the Omaha World-Journal:
“My diet, though far from standard, is somewhat better than usually portrayed. I have a wonderful doctor who nudges me in your direction every time I see him. All in all, I’ve enjoyed remarkably good health — largely because of genes, of course — but also, I think, because I enjoy life so much every day.” When his doctor told him that he had to either change his diet or exercise, he picked “the lesser of two evils,” he said.
Of course, I would be quick to point out that it’s not really a choice. Long-term well being depends on both. And investing an hour a day in exercise is known to offer the kind of long-term returns he appreciates.
So far, though, Buffett has shown no signs of ill health. “But he has acknowledged there may come a time when his mental faculties begin to fade,” writes Ng. “He said he expects Bill Gates— a longtime friend, bridge partner and member of the Berkshire board—to tell him if it is time to step down.” In his letter to shareholders a few years ago, he also noted that when a person’s abilities decline so usually do their powers of self-assessment. “Someone else often needs to blow the whistle.”
Francisco Varallo, Last Livng Player in the 1930 World Cup
June 24, 2010
I’ve been bogged down with research for a new book for the last couple of weeks and regret letting time slip between posts. Of course, I still found time to watch World Cup soccer and relish yesterday’s sensational climax, with Landon Donovan’s 91st minute strike. As has been much noted, the last time the U.S. made the leap out of group play was 80 years ago at the 1930 World Cup.
In February “Little Canon” Francisco Varallo, the last living member of the second place team from Argentina, was honored by Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) at celebration of his 100th birthday.
He was also the youngest player in that first World Cup, played in Montevideo, Uruguay. Argentina lost the final game 4-2 to the hometown team.
Here’s a more recent photo.
“It was like a dream come true,” Varallo told FIFA’s World magazine for it’s March issue. “I was just a boy and I was in awe of players like Luis Monti, Manuel Ferreira, Guillermo Stabil. In those days the coaches barely spoke, and it was the most experienced players who decided on the starting 11. On the day of my debut against France, I asked the captain, Ferreira, how I should play, and he replied: “Play the way you know how, do what you want.”
Varallo injured his knee during a match against Chile and had to sit out the semi-final match in which Argentina defeated the U.S. team. “I was in pain and I shouldn’t have played in the final,” but he was determined to play for his country. “I played my heart out in the second half and I could feel it in my knee. We were down to ten men, and as the match went on, another was injured, and another. There were no substitutions then: we were left with eight players on the field. But they beat us fairly and squarely, what can you do?”
Training was much different in the 1930s. They practiced only three days a week, sometimes less often. The only nutritional advice Varallo’s coach offered was not to eat salami sandwiches. “I always ate very well, a variety of things. I had a typically Argentinian diet, with a lot of meat. And before a match I would ask for seconds. Roberto Cherro used to ask me, ‘Panchito, how come you eat more than the rest of us?’ And I would explain ]If I don’t, I won’t score any goals.’ He didn’t smoke or drink alcohol or carbonated beverages.“It must have been a good diet because I’ve still got my own teeth,” he said. “Some of that is down to genetics, of course, but I was never fat and I maintained my muscles. I also never had a medical check-up during my career. The advances that have been made in that area are fantastic. I never fully recovered from the injury I sustained at the World Cup in Uruguay. Nowadays, players recover in no time from operations – it’s extraordinary, they walk out of surgery!”
After the historic final match, played at the Estadio Centenario, Varallo went on to glory with Boca Juniors, where he scored 181 goals in 210 matches – a record that remained unshattered until 2008.
“I find it incredible that young people know who I am,” he mused. ” When I was in France, people from Germany, Poland, England, Switzerland ... they all wanted to meet me, with a lot of passion and respect. They still send me letters to my house. And some even send presents. They are unforgettable gestures that make me very happy. And it’s all thanks to football! Here in La Plata, everybody knows me: old folks, young people, children…they all say hello to me. I was named an ‘illustrious citizen’. Now that I’m old, more tributes are being paid to me than before. It seems I’m still important!”
Gratitude: Patti Smith, Budget Threat To NYPL, And Moral Motivation
May 20, 2010
With Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget threatening to devastate the New York Public Library with an historic $37 million cut, it may seem a curious choice to harness rocker Patti Smith, the library, and idea of moral motivation with the word “gratitude.” So, stick with me.
A couple of weeks ago, writing in the Huffington Post, library President Paul LeClerc outlined ample reasons to dread the proposed cuts:
At the moment that they are most needed, the free services offered by The New York Public Library in 90 libraries across the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island - including job search assistance - are imperiled. Additionally, if Bloomberg’s cut is adopted next month, more than 25% of all library jobs in New York would be eliminated, six million fewer items would be circulated, and ten libraries would be closed. Perhaps most devastating, computer access critical to the city’s youth and poor, would be reduced by an estimated two million sessions. Anyone who has read Marilyn Johnson’s fascinating new work, This Book Is Overdue will appreciate how much more is at stake.
Why then talk about gratitude?
Well, first, there’s Patti Smith. Searching on the Internet for discussion of the proposed cuts, I came across her appearance at the New York Public Library on April 29. In addition to chatting up Just Kids, her memoir about her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the poet and one-time Brentano’s book clerk rose to the defense of the library. But it was her performance of her song “Grateful” that moved me most:
And that got me thinking about what my first heart-thumping, imagination-flaring visit to the New York Public Library and why gratitude might be a better public relations strategy for restoring the cuts than fear.
[Blog Post Continued]
At some point in high school, I was faced with a project I could not adequately research in the library in Long Beach, N.Y., where I lived. I no longer recall what possessed me, but one Saturday morning I boarded an LIRR train and made my first solo trip into Manhattan. I felt bravely cosmopolitan as I walked from Penn Station to great library on 42nd Street. I paid no heed to the giant sculpted lions that guard the library’s impressive front steps. But inside, everything changed. A trembling reverence overtook me when I stepped into the main reading room, as long as a football field, and when I handed a librarian my penciled call card. I waited—with my heart in my throat—for my books to be delivered from the miles of stacks. I spent the day reading—or trying to—at the old-fashioned library table with brass lamps, in the most awesome room in which I had ever set foot.
I was simultaneously transported, distracted, and transformed. I’m not sure if I could have articulated it then, but I felt privileged—lucky to sit in that cathedral of learning. I felt electrified by the energy of minds at work around me. And as I watched men and women of every type and class turn pages and take notes, stare into space and fasten on phrases, I was swept away by the boundless potential of the place, by its mysterious majesty, and by the sense that this was democracy’s paradise. When I eventually left for the train home, I felt an irrevocable pride about what I had learned and where I had learned it.
I still feel grateful for that day, and I carry that gratitude with me every time I enter a library, no matter its size.
And it’s that kind of gratitude—a sense of what we might personally have lost if we hadn’t had the privilege of libraries and access to information that people should be asked to recall as they consider the proposed cuts. Why? Well, one reason is that it has everything to do with the way expressing and feeling gratitude affects moral behavior.
For the last decade or so, scientists have been catching up with philosophers, psychologists, and the religious in concluding that gratitude is a critically potent agent of human health, wholeness, and well-being. Cutting-edge experiments have shown, for instance, that those who kept a gratitude journal for three weeks experienced fewer adverse physical symptoms and felt more positive and optimistic about their lives than those who recorded their daily travails or reported neutrally on the events of their lives. Moreover, those who keep a gratitude list are more likely to make progress toward important personal goals than others, according to Robert A. Emmons, a professor at UC Davis, a leading scholar of the positive psychology movement, and author of Thanks.
It should be enough for us to recognize how damaging the library cuts will be to critical library services and to people whose best hope of escaping poverty is found in libraries, but it turns out that by experiencing gratitude, Emmons says, “a person is motivated to carry out pro-social behavior, energized to sustain moral behaviors, and is inhibited from committing destructive interpersonal behvior.” Gratitude, he concludes, “serves as a moral motive.”
Late Shift: Career Reinventions
May 17, 2010
Rhonda Kave (center, above, with kids Corwin and Allison) did an exemplary truffle-shuffle, according to one of Linley Taber’s three stories on career reinvention in The New York Post (5/17/2010) which prove its never too late to land your dream job.
After a couple of decades running a beauty supply store and then working for a non-profit countering domestic violence while studying sociology, Kave finally made her sweetest move, in 2007, when her grown children moved out and she separated from her husband. Kathy Gurland pursued a series of careers before her younger sister’s cancer made her calling as a cancer treatment conusltant clear to her. And rather than retiring from 35 years of teaching English at John Jay College in New York City, 68-year-old Eric Larson has launched a new career as a renegade publisher of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Read the full package at: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/late_shift_zyj40nx1YcrymeoOtjC3zN and a Q&A with me at: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/new_agers_FXBKbEJTGJIcM4ETKHPc5I
Betty White Has Recipe For Laughs On Saturday Night Live
May 9, 2010
” title=“Betty White on SNL”>Betty White on SNL
Of course, Betty White seems to have always known what to do with her life. On Saturday night, the 88-year-old comedienne proved her instincts—and timing—as flawless at making people laugh as ever, even for a television show that caters to people one quarter her age.
And to think, all it took for her to get her crack at hosting “Saturday Night Live” was seven decades of show business, six Emmy Awards, and a campaign on Facebook. In her day, she noted, there was, instead, the phone book, but no one would ever “waste an afternoon” on it.
She added that she had done live television early in her career, though not by choice. “People didn’t know how to tape then,” White said.
For the Mother’s Day episode, she was joined by an all-star cast of female SNL alumni, including Molly Shannon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer. And none of the skits she appeared in proved too inappropriate for her, including playing an irreverent foil of a muffin mavin.
Lower Flags for “Queen” Dorothy Height, 98, Civil Rights Matriarch
April 20, 2010
Flags should fly at half mast. The nation should stand for a minute in silence. And children who never heard the name Dorothy Irene Height should learn it now and in the future, for her critical role in leading the nation toward racial and gender equality, and doing so as a model of dignified determination to win civil rights for all Americans. She died Tuesday at 98.
A high school valedictorian denied acceptance to Barnard College because it had surpassed its quota of two African Americans, she distinguished herself at New York University. After, she went from working as a welfare caseworker in Harlem to the YWCA, where an early assignment to escort Eleanor Roosevelt on a visit brought her to the attention of her future mentor, educator and early civil rights advocate Mary McLeod Bethune. She would go on to serve for 40 years as the president of the National Council of Negro Women.
During that time, she worked tirelessly for equal opportunity in the work place and on voter registration drives, on development projects in the U. S. and Africa, and fought for women’s equality before it was fashionable to do so. She once said, “If the times aren’t ripe, you have to ripen the times.” (See Bart Barnes thorough obit in The Washington Post @ Dorothy Height Obit
Height first met Martin Luther King when he was 15, and would one day stand on the platform next to him when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. “I call Rosa Parks the mother of the civil rights movement,” said activist C. Delores Tucker. “Dorothy Height is the queen.”
President Obama, in a statement Tuesday, called Height “the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans.”
She credited Bethune with being a model of steadfast assertiveness with humor. She firmly believed in dressing for success. “I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down.”
$25K “Champion in Action” Award For Barbara and Ira Smith’s HGRM
April 17, 2010
With his usual modesty, Ira Smith messaged, “Good things just keep happening up here.”
Translation: Household Goods Recycling of Massachusettts (HGRM), the all-volunteer agency that was the brainchild of Ira’s wife Barbara Smith (profiled in “What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life?”) was awarded $25,000 this week by Citizens Bank and NECN as a “Champion in Action,” for what the organization has done for families.
The Acton,MA-based HGRM is now the largest provider of direct household assistance in New England. It distributes more than 31,000 pieces of donated furniture to more than 4,000 families in need per year. Its clients, including victims of fires or floods, women and children escaping abusive domestic situations, people coming out of halfway houses, war veterans, refugees and recent immigrants, come from more than 40 communities in Eastern Massachusetts.
Here’s a NECN’s news report:
With the help of 250 volunteers and in partnership with more than 300 social service agencies, HGRM distributes more than 31,000 pieces of furniture and appliances to 4,000 families per year. Since 2004, HGRM has collected and recycled nearly 100,000 items of furniture that would have otherwise gone to landfills and transfer stations.
“HGRM provides furniture and household goods to help individuals and families who are transitioning through a difficult time. These items not only make a home – they provide a sense of hope and dignity, and the courage to move forward towards a brighter future,” said Stephen R. Woods, President, Citizens Bank, Massachusetts.
HGRM began in 1990 when Barbara Smith placed a notice in her Catholic parish’s newsletter requesting help furnishing an apartment for a woman fleeing violence in El Salvador.
The non-profit started its operations out of the Smith’s house, then moved to a barn, and now uses a 10,000-square foot warehouse. It will celebrate its 20th anniversary on Sunday, May 2 outside its facility in Acton. For the event, designers will transform storage pods used to keep overflow household goods using donated furniture. There’ll be food and music, and I’ll be on hand to sign copies of “What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life,” which includes a chapter on the Smiths.
To learn more go to: 20th Anniversary
Tigers Fans Hope Kentucky Colonel Revives Success
March 22, 2010
The image of white-suited and goateed Kentucky Colonel Harland Sanders, who was in his sixties when he founded a little fried chicken business, remains for many Americans the ultimate icon of success in later life. But in Japan his effigy has had a little different history for the last 25 years—one, until recently, associated with a curse on baseball’s legendary Hanshin Tigers.
The team hasn’t won a championship since the Tigers victory in the Japan Series in 1985. Following the win, fans grabbed a life-size statue of the Colonel from in front of a Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken and, to celebrate, pitched it into the Dontonburi Canal because it resembled slugging first baseman Randy Bass. Baseball lore had it that the Tigers would never win a championship again until the statue was found. In March, hope resurfaced for the Tigers when a construction crew, building a boardwalk along the canal, discovered the statue. The refurbished statue, now glass enclosed for protection, was placed on display last week at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet near Hanshin Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya.
Over the last couple of decades, Bass, 56, the greatest foreign slugger in Japanese baseball history, has also reinvented himself. After retiring from play in Japan, he returned to his hometown, Lawton, Oklahoma, where, in 2004, Bass, a Democrat, was elected to the Legislature as a state senator. During his years with Hanshin (1983-1988), Bass—who played in the Major Leagues for the Kansas City Royals, the Montreal Expos, and the Texas Rangers—set eight national records in Japan. He still holds the season high batting average mark of .389, set in 1986, and remains the only player to win back-to-back Triple Crowns.
Colonel Sanders was, it may seem, almost pure self-invention. He was neither an authentic colonel nor a native Kentuckian. He was born in 1890 in Henryville, Indiana, where he grew up in poverty on a farm and claimed to learn to cook from his widowed mother. He dropped out of school when he was in seventh grade, and in the years that followed he worked as a farmhand, buggy painter, streetcar conductor, and life insurance salesman. At age 40, he began serving food in the living quarters attached to his service station in Corbin, Kentucky. By 1935, Governor Ruby Lafoon made him a “Kentucky Colonel” for his contribution to the state’s cuisine. He moved the restaurant and expanded it, but when Insterstate 75 was built and bypassed Corbin, it devastated his business. In 1955, at age 65, he was virtually broke when he sold the restaurant.
Using $105 from his first Social Security check, he began crisscrossing the country at a clip of 250,000 miles a year and selling the secret recipe to his “finger lickin’” pressure-fried chicken to franchisees. In 1964, he sold the U.S. corporation for $2 million to a group of investors and moved to Canada, where he retained control over the Canadian company. He died in 1980 in Louisville, Kentucky, at age 90.
Political Pilgrim Doris “Granny D” Haddock Dies at 100
March 10, 2010
Doris “Granny D” Haddock, the gnome-sized New Hampshire woman whose trek across the continental United States at 89 helped galvanize national support for campaign finance reform, died Tuesday at her home in Dublin, N.H. She was 100.
One of the chapters of my book braids together Haddock’s heroic 14-month, 3,200-mile march and Alidra Solday’s five-year effort to make “Granny D Goes to Washington.” Solday’s film chronicles Haddock’s fight to get Americans to take back their government from special interest groups and private industry by restricting political donations. Here’s the trailer:
I last spoke to Doris Haddock about a year ago. Between coughs triggered by the respiratory illness that caused her death, she spoke as passionately as ever about the need for Americans to become politically involved to save their democracy. In the Alidra’s film, she explained the motivation for her walk across the country this way: “If you look at your life, you will see your your life is made up of acts. And this is my last act. I would like to make some news of my life.” And she did. Important news. Valuable news.
Doris Haddock was a Yankee through and through. Vulnerability was not her style. “As she told me, Granny D is more poetic than Doris. But Doris has more street smarts and is tougher than Granny D,” Alidra said last year. “Either way, she really does believe in kindness and caring and that you are your brother’s keeper.”
Doris had turned 100 on Jan. 24 and, according to Alidra, she “was the bell of the ball at several parties given in her honor. We had spoken of death many times while making the film. She was finally ready.” In an email Tuesday night, Alidra said she had spoken with Jim, Haddock’s son, earlier and he had comforted Alidra by reminding her that Granny D “had a good run.”
“I will miss her,” Alidra said. “She was precious to me.”
Here’s the New York Time’s obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/03/09/us/AP-US-Obit-Haddock.html
Granny DJ in Paris
March 7, 2010
I was all set to post some interesting new studies on the reasons why we need to turn off our computers, shove off from our desk, and move. And I will. But first, here’s one of the millions of successes in later life that is not in my book. It is, as the story in the Telegraph says, a bit “glammy.” And it has me wondering about the back story more than the hook. Pehaps, I’ll follow it up. In the meantime:
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Personalizing History: Betty Reid Soskin Remembers Port Chicago
February 27, 2010
It’s been a big month for Betty Reid Soskin, who, at 88, is the oldest ranger in the National Park Service and whose extraordinary life story is the focus of the final chapter of my new book.
She’s been featured recently in several TV and newspaper reports about legislation signed recently by President Barack Obama as part of an effort to bring renewed awareness to the worst home-front disaster of World War II, the horrific munitions explosion that killed 320 men— two-thirds of them African American— at Port Chicago, California on July 17, 1944.
The controversial mutiny that ensued after the disaster helped bring an end to the racial segregation of the U.S. military. The Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial, located on the Suisun Bay, will become a full unit of the National Park System, following approval by Congress. Here’s the raw footage of Betty’s interview with Rodney Speed about the explosion at Port Chicago for a segment of the evening news on WPIX-TV of San Francisco:
http://www.news10.net/video/#/Raw+Video%3A+Betty+Reid+talks+Port+Chicago+disaster/67549484001
For Betty, the tragedy is deeply personal. A dozen of the dead had attended a lemonade party at her house earlier in the day. “Each time I’m at the memorial site and re-positioned in that deceptively tranquil setting,” she wrote recently on her blog, “I can feel the presence of the unseen, and the stories flow and—it’s almost as though we’ve brought the life with us to this monument.”
Since the beginning of the year, Betty has accepted an invitation to receive an honorary doctorate and to deliver the commencement address to the graduating class of 2010 from the California College of the Arts. She has also agreed to take a role in a benefit performance of Eve Ensler’s award-winning “Vagina Monologues” in a production to be held in the historic Craneway Pavilion of Ford Point, Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park located in Richmond, California, near San Francisco. The proceeds will go to violence prevention programs in the city.
A warm welcome!
January 31, 2010
This is my first blog post. Let’s call it a test. I’m not native to blogging. But who is?
The blog will focus on:
- Successful Aging ~ updates on the lives of the subjects of What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life, and reports on other people who achieve remarkably in later life, how they do it, and why.
- Neuorscience ~ interviews with research scientists about their investigations and new findings about brain plasticity and how to protect, maintain, and improve your brain as you age.
- Dance and the Brain ~ an ongoing exploration of how exercise, movement, and dance— the tango, in particular— stimulate neural growth and protect against cognitive decline and diseases of the brain.
- Miscellaneous ~ surprise indulgences of relevant news, commentary, art, poetry, politics, and sports.