Age 75 Is No Stopping Point!

      My friend Wallace Kaufman gave me the 75x75 project of compiling a list of people who accomplished significant things in their lives after the age of 75. 

      The accomplishments make your jaw drop. For instance, there's Dr. Leila Denmark, who didn't retire as a practicing pediatrician until she was 103. She lived to be 114, the fourth-oldest-verified person in the world. AND SHE WAS MY DOCTOR, the pediatrician my mother took all her children to. I put her first in my book.

Dr. Denmark, with patient and patent's mother

      Other people in science, medicine, and economics include Dr. Ruth, who was still performing on TV when she was 79. 

      The next heading is "literature," with 14 names of people who have published after the age of 75. I love it that Roget was still overseeing editions of his famous thesaurus, which I still use, of course (so much better than the online thesaurus!), until he died at the age of 90. The poet Stanley Kunitz published an autobiography when he was 100, but my favorite entry here is the little known Harry Bernstein, who published his first book, an autobiographical novel, when he was 97 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship at the age of 98 "to pursue his writing." He published the third book in his series of autobiographical novels the following year and died the next year at the age of 100. 

      There are only three entries in the section of "Music," including pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who performed "one of his greatest recitals" in Carnegie Hall when he was 89.

     "Film and Theater" has five entries, some that you might expect – Jessica Tandy (Academy Award for Best Actress, Driving Miss Daisy – at age 80) and Christopher Plummer (Oscar at age 82, Beginners), but do you remember the 1984 Wendy's commercial, "Where's the beef?" Clara Peller, the actress in that commercial, was 81 and had only just been "discovered" as a feisty, spicy actress.

Clara Peller

      Next to "literature," with fourteen entries, "visual arts" suggests a field in which the artist can continue well into old age. There are ten entries in my book. You might have come up with Georgia O'Keeffe and Grandma Moses without too much thinking, but also included are Michelangelo, Marc Chagall, and a former slave from Alabama, Bill Traylor, who taught himself to paint at the age of 85, exhibited at 87, and had his New York debut at 89. My favorite entry is my mother, who had an art show when she was 88, of pastel paintings she had done with her left arm after a stroke left her right arm paralyzed.

      A omnigatherum of accomplishments in law, chess, religion, and aeronautics brings in four people (the 19th-century British Lord Chancellor Hardinga Giffard, Asa Long, Mary Baker Eddy, and John Glenn, respectively). Achievements in education include a number of advanced degrees at advanced ages (including the oldest college graduate ever, Nola Ochs, with a masters degree at age 99), but my favorite entry is the Kenyan Kimani Maruge, who entered first grade at the age of 84 and addressed the United Nations in New York (first time on an airplane) the following year, on the importance of free primary education.

Kimani Maruga, in first-grade class

      There are the statesmen and political activists, such as Ghandi and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas (eight of them), but the biggest category by far is "physical achievements," with twenty entires, beginning with my father, who built a barn at the age of 80 and, between the ages of 85 and 95, turned a large wooden screw, on a lathe he made himself, for a historical village's reproduction of an ox-turned cotton baler .

      In this category are mountain climbers, sailors, runners (including  Fauja Singh, the first person to finish a marathon at 100), hikers, the highwire performer William Ivy Baldwin (who was 82 when he did his last highwire walk, over a canyon in Eldorado Springs, Colorado), one swimmer, one bungee jumper (at age 96), and one water skier (still skiing at 101). The most remarkable entry in the whole book, though, in my opinion, is Tao Porchon-Lynch, who is still teaching yoga at 100.

Tao Porchon-Lynch, in lotus position

     It looks like I have a lot to do after my 75th birthday in July!