When they reach what we call 'middle age', some people wear out like old shoes. Some people burn out like bugs in a blue zapper. And some people rust out like old engine blocks heaved over cliffs onto headland rocks. Some people, though, just get better and better, like a Grandfather Port.
No one knows why it is that people age so differently. Of course, this is because there are as many reasons as there are individuals. Each person out of the many billions who have already trod this planet, has a singular journey, an individual psychology and a unique self-determination of beliefs. Beliefs and values are what drive the soul: people largely make themselves by what they think. Our condition in later life is determined by countless tiny, medium and large choices
– godzillions of binary YES/NO switches – along the ethereal narrative of life.
The fact remains that some people do things well into their advanced years; there are also some who were already pretty long in the tooth before they really got started in life. We need them for inspiration, these late starters and late achievers, because, as Thoreau said, most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, and when middle age hits it often gets worse, not better. We look in the rear view mirror at lost opportunities, and through the windscreen at a sour and parched future. But the best of us can learn and grow by reaffirming our belief (if we ever had it) that, yes, we can grow old with vigour, creativity and enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm. 'God within', it means in the Greek. The spark that can ignite the fire within is mysterious in origin, but it is often found in the midst of darkness, despair and failure. For some people the blessing in later life seems to fall from the sky, for others it is self-hewn out of lessons learned slowly. Sometimes it's just a matter of a man or woman ceasing to hit their heads against a wall of unyielding error or terror; sometimes it's a chance word of wisdom heard for the first time. Sometimes luck makes the people; sometimes the people make their own luck. If you're short on the former, practise the latter. And never give up.
The old Kroc
A bit of each happened to a no-account milk-shake machine salesman named
Ray Kroc in 1954. Fifty-two years of age and going nowhere, Kroc was diabetic, arthritic and suffering gall bladder and thyroid problems. His unbrilliant career had seen him a high school dropout, a WWI ambulance driver, board marker in a brokerage establishment, paper cup salesman and jazz musician. Fame and fortune eluded him, until one day Ray Kroc scratched his head and asked himself how it could be that two hamburger-store proprietor brothers, Mac and Dick McDonald, could keep so many of his Multimixers in operation.
Kroc's detective work into the success of the two original McDonald's stores led finally to his acquisition of the property. He transformed the McBrothers' philosophy of cleanliness, service, inexpensive food and limited menu into the transnational corporation that people can either love or hate, but never ignore. Today McDonald's is known in most parts of the planet, all because a man who should have gone on sickness benefits and reminisced about his salad days playing piano in seedy speakeasies, had a moment of vision and then the tenacity to see it through.
Old-age finger-licker; ancient villain
Kroc's counterpart in greasy grills was the fried chicken king,
Harland Sanders –
Colonel Sanders. In his forties, Harland lost a son and was soon charged with shooting a competitor to his gas station. However, he pulled himself together and started cooking chickens. At the age of 65 he turned a one-man store into Kentucky Fried Chicken which today sells seven per cent of the federally inspected chickens in the United States and has thousands of stores worldwide. Better than lying down and dying!
If money and commercial success are one measure of achievement, another character who scores well is
Armand Hammer. At 58 years of age the cranky Dr Hammer bought a small oil company called Occidental for $100,000, and over the next two or three decades built it into the eighth-largest petroleum corporation in the world. Occidental joined the 'seven sisters' which included Esso and BP. As with Kroc and Sanders, it is not whether we approve of his business or business methods that is the point of this story
– Hammer was a villain's villain
– it is his refusal to accept the conventional wisdom, that age is a major constraint, that is heroic. At 88 years of age, Hammer was an intermediary in the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and irascibly ran huge corporations until his death at the age of 91.
Some give their mature years to service to humanity or to needy causes. Ask any project officer in a welfare or charity organisation and you'll be told of the efforts of special people who donate time and energy to make things happen. Often the older members are the powerhouses of an organisation's activities.
Flying doctors
Service to humanity provided Dr Anne Spoerry a raison d'etre in her autumn years. As a flying doctor in East Africa, this remarkable woman flew herself in a small plane to the far reaches of Kenya and Nairobi, bringing hope and healing to the poor and disadvantaged who flocked to her shade-tree clinics. The
octogenarian Dr Spoerry worked tirelessly till her death in early 1999, having left a mark on the lives of thousands.
Africa's suffering also called the Alsace-born Nobel laureate,
Albert Schweitzer to service. At the age of 38, when too many people these days are bemoaning their 'lost youth', Albert, who had left his job as a theologian and studied medicine to work for humanity, set sail for 'the dark continent'. His work at his equatorial medical compound, in Lambaréné, Gabon, is legendary. When he was in his late forties, after some time in a German concentration camp, he was stricken with grief when his mother died in a terrible accident. Ill and depressed, he worked in Germany to remain solvent. To revive his physical and emotional strength, he restored old pipe organs and underwent psychoanalysis. At 47 he returned to Lambaréné where he not only battled epidemics and famine, but worked as a labourer on the hospital he had founded in middle age. Schweitzer continued to serve and to write many influential books on the spirit, till his death at the age of 90. An idealist till he departed, he still challenges us today with his motto: "Grow into your ideals, so that life can never rob you of them".
Mid-life Solidarity
Idealism made a hero of
Lech Walesa in middle age. Born into a humble Polish family in 1943, the naval electrician in his thirties was labelled a unionist troublemaker by the authorities in the city of Gdansk, and they dismissed him, but he continued organising. At 37, unknown to the world, he stepped into the leadership shoes of Solidarnosc, the free trade union, and a year later was imprisoned for eleven months. His years of struggle led to this tradesman becoming elected, at 47, the president of Poland's first post-Communist government. By galvanising international opinion against Marxist monopoly of employment, law, information and politics, it might be said that Walesa, more than any other person, was a catalyst in bringing down most of the world's non-Asian Communist dictatorships.
What were these people made of? Is it their genetic imperative to blossom in advanced years? And why do some people bloom in youth? After all,
Keats was dead at 25,
Buddy Holly at 23 and
Hendrix at 27, and all are still considered to be pinnacles in their arts. The thing is, we don't know how much more brilliance their light would have cast had they lived long lives. The French poet
Rimbaud gave us all he had to give in his teens, tossed in writing at (would you believe?!) nineteen, and lived a (poetically at least) uncreative life a while longer. Was he programmed to stop, or did he program himself? The former view smacks, to this writer's mind, too much of predestination, a philosophy that is based on supposition rather than knowledge or hope, and puts the tyre-clamps on human potential, both individually and culturally.
Go Cliffy!
Being a late starter or late achiever can even involve physical fulfilment. It will be a long time before Australians forget the amazing performance of
Cliff Young, who at
61 beat a field of relative youngsters to win the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne marathon. Young showed a nation that the human body can give remarkable returns for the investment of effort. Not all of us can run a thousand kilometres, fast or slow, but the testimony of countless active aged people is that if we keep our bodies working, we needn't rust out.
Nonetheless, despite the proliferation of gyms, sports grounds, yoga classes and the like, many if not most people in our society tend to wind down fast after middle age, and it is difficult not to suspect that as a society we are generally asleep, collectively unaware of what we could be. A confluence of many cultural factors conspires to shackle our minds to an image of the elderly as 'less than'. One such factor (and the economic determinists will love this one) is to do with employment. People once viewed themselves as 'retired' at 65; increasingly the magic number is 55. The world of advertising and pop culture, too, accentuates youth
– firstly because sex sells (and only the most recalcitrant age-lib activist would assert that sexuality is not most vigorous in youth), and also because of spending patterns and expectations of spending patterns (many of them held by baby-boomers but nonetheless obsolete since the 1970s) in consumer society. Many other factors contribute to our delusion; religious ("Why bother, we'll do it in heaven"), cultural, the whole shebang.
My name is Bill, and I'm an alcoholic
Perhaps if we could wipe clean our minds and create new images of what we could be, we could not only live longer but live better longer. One person who had to do this, and who actually fought his way back from physical and mental disintegration in middle age to create a bright, shining life, was
William Griffith
Wilson. Bill W, as he is known to millions of grateful people around the world, lived from 1895 till 1971. At 40 he was a ruined drunk. He was counselled by a Christian friend, and though Bill W himself was no deist, he was so overwhelmed by his need for faith in a 'Higher Power' that what he described as some kind of miracle gave him the strength to turn his life round 180 degrees.
Though frequently beset by difficulties and the vestigial negativities from a life of self-medication with alcohol, which manifested as depression, Bill W started sharing his liberation of spirit with other alcoholics. When he was 43 he wrote a book called Alcoholics Anonymous, and the name stuck. Bill Wilson's greatest life work was not his wheeling and dealing on the stock exchange when he was young, it was his creation of AA when he was middle aged and his enthusiastic building of the organisation when he was old. Because of this late start and his promotion of the disease model of alcoholism (he said it was a physical, mental and spiritual disease), millions of people in scores of countries are today living to old age instead of succumbing to something that had never been conquered in human history.
L to R: Flying doctor Spoerry; perennial Krishnamurti; ancient chicken-man Sanders;
redoubtable Queen Victoria; Oscar-winner F Murray Abraham
The list of late starters and late achievers goes
on:
-
Donald
Horne: the popular Australian author first had a book published at 42;
-
F Murray Abraham: got his first decent role (Amadeus, for which he won an Oscar) at 45;
-
Margaret Fink
(born 1933) produced the Australian feature film,
Candy,
in 2006, at the age of 73;
-
Frank Lloyd Wright: created New York's amazing Guggenheim Museum when he was 80;
-
Dick King-Smith
was 56 when he wrote the first of his more than 100 popular children's
books;
-
Grandma Moses was
a young 78 when she began painting, almost 100 when she found fame and fortune;
-
Nelson Mandela
(born 1918) became President of South Africa in 1994; on his 89th
birthday, he announced the formation of
The Elders;
-
Jiddu Krishnamurti:
no late starter, but his career as a teacher of philosophy continued well into his eighties;
-
Samuel
Richardson at the age of 51 wrote his first novel – and immediately became one of the most popular and admired writers of his time;
-
Queen
Victoria: she ruled the British Empire through 63 years of its most dramatic expansion;
-
Mother
Jones (‘the Miners’ Angel’: ‘the
greatest woman agitator of our times’), Irish-American
anti-war activist and labor radical; at 37 years of age she became active
in the union movement following the death of her husband and was active
for many of the next 63 years; (more);
-
Winston Churchill: this British bulldog made his biggest contributions to history beginning at the age of 66. In old age he was a prolific writer,
(he was in his late-70s when he wrote the great
A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples), painter and bricklayer, building walls on his estate;
-
In 2007, while in her 92nd year,
Barbara Reynolds,
British scholar, lexicographer and translator, published an acclaimed
biography of
Dante;
-
Australian great-great-grandmother
Olive Riley
took up blogging at the age of 107;
-
Pablo Picasso
worked almost to
his death at the age of 91, in 1973. From 1968 to 1971 he produced a
torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings;
-
Mohandas Gandhi
(Mahatma Gandhi) was well into his 60s and 70s when his most famous
works and movements were done;
-
Dr Benjamin Spock was
83 when he was arrested for demonstrating for peace;
-
Ronald Reagan: at 77 he held his fourth and final summit meeting with
Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to the scrapping of US/USSR intermediate nuclear
forces;
-
Coco
Chanel was well into her 80s and still designing fashions;
-
Charles Perrault (1628 - 1703), the French writer who gave us such
classic fairy tales as
Cinderella and Tom Thumb, published them in 1697 at the age of
69, not under his own name but that of his infant son, Perrault d’Armancourt;
-
English writer and lexicographer
Dr Samuel Johnson
was 69 began his last major work,
Lives of the English Poets;
-
George
Bernard Shaw was a famed wit and writer when he was in his 80s and
90s;
-
Elizabeth Jolley
(1923 - 2007), famed English-born Australian writer, wrote her first
novel when she was nearly sixty years old;
-
Phyllis Diller, American comedienne, was 37 when she started her
career;
-
Falstaff, by Giuseppe
Verdi (1813 - 1901), premiered in 1893 when the
composer was 80. It was Verdi's last opera and is considered one of the greatest comic
operas;
-
In 1965, 70-year-old R
Buckminster Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in
Paris; he worked long after this;
-
Benjamin Franklin helped draft the Declaration of
Independence at the age of 70;
-
Joseph Farwell
Glidden (1813 - 1906), American farmer (Illinois), received a patent for the first commercial barbed wire on
November 24,
1874 when he was 61. Glidden became one of America’s wealthiest men;
-
Sir Henry Parkes: In
his 70s he married his mistress, became a father (at 74) and set out to
bring all the Australian colonies into one federation; the nation of
Australia is largely a result of his strenuous campaigning;
-
American comedian Lewis
Black; almost no one had heard of him till he was 55, although he'd
been working hard at it for years. His practice paid off in the end;
-
Mary Baker Eddy
was only 87 when she founded the Christian Science Monitor;
-
Hungarian actress and singer Mártha Eggerth
performed professionally into her 90s;
-
Alfred Hitchcock,
born in 1899, scared cinema goers with films from 1922 until 1976;
-
Jessica
Mitford, the British aristocrat author of the international
best-seller,
The American Way of Death, in her 70s had a cabaret
singing act in San Francisco. The show really stank (listen,
mp3, 5.13MB), but that's not my
point!
-
In 1955, Lord Bertrand Russell and eight others called for the abolition of
war, and he remained a prominent peace activist for many years.
He was born in 1872 and published
his autobiography
in three volumes in the late 1960s. While he grew frail, he remained lucid until the end;
-
Jessica Tandy
won an Oscar recipient for her role in
Driving Miss Daisy, aged a
mere 80;
-
American progressive
political activist Granny
Haddock (Granny D) didn't know that in her nineties she was supposed
to stop helping to change the world. At age 89 (1999) she famously walked across the continental United States
to advocate campaign finance reform, and five years later began a campaign
to become a Democratic candidate for the USA Senate;
-
Hollywood
actress Mae West,
at the age of 85, played in the movie
Sextette (1978;
based on her own play) with
youngsters like Timothy Dalton,
Dom DeLuise,
Tony Curtis,
Ringo Starr and
Alice
Cooper;
-
Aged 82, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe finished writing
Faust;
-
American novelist,
Edith Wharton,
was 43 when her first novel was published; she went on to publish more
than 40 books;
-
George Burns
worked almost right to his death at 100 years of age, and won an Oscar at
80 for his role in The Sunshine Boys;
-
Daisy
Bates began her life's work at about 36 when she went into the
Australian desert to work among tribal Aborigines, and worked into old age;
-
In
1967 the 65-year-old solo yachtsman Francis Chichester
arrived back in Britain after 119 days of sailing around the world, the
first person ever to do it solo;
-
When she was 39 and
poor as a church mouse, 'Mother of Women's Suffrage' Louisa
Lawson left her farm and husband, and moved hundreds of miles away
with four children into a little house in Sydney, Australia; a few years
later she began Dawn,
the suffragette magazine which she published for 17 years;
-
By the time
Canadian-born American economist John
Kenneth Galbraith was in his mid-90s, he had sold 8 million books and
been awarded 52 honorary doctorates, and was still writing;
-
Peg
Phillips, American actress (Northern Exposure) started acting professionally in her late 60s after retiring from a career as an accountant.
-
Voltaire was
65 when he wrote one of Western literature's most admired and popular
works,
Candide;
-
A sprightly 85,
Jeanne Calment
took up the sport of fencing at 85, and lived to the age of 122;
-
At the age of 80, Sir
George Martin,
respected producer of The Beatles, produced the widely acclaimed Beatles
remix,
Love;
-
Harry Bernstein's first book, The Invisible Wall, came out in
April, 2009, just weeks before the author's 97th birthday.
(Know any more? Let me
know! Names of late achievers are
welcome, as well as late starters. My email is in the FAQ in top menu.)
Like 'em or loathe 'em, sinners or saints, those men and women who break out of the square of self-programmed senescence can be seen as models for the rest of us. Perhaps it isn't so much a matter of only finding out what breakfast cereals and vitamins they ate
– Bill W's diet was scarcely one to emulate, certainly not before he got sober (and like Churchill, he did smoke all his life). Nor is our inspiration simply to be found in their lifestyle habits, though much can be learned to extend longevity from the study of them.
More than this, it seems, we have limitless opportunities to discover the keys of thought, faith and belief that contribute to the unleashing of human potential. In the
21st Century, with the globe in its present state of psychic trauma, and getting worse, the wisdom of the elders is sorely needed. Our heroes and heroines of the future will be those who impart simple, DIY techniques of how to live fully alive, for all our lives.
Just for fun:
Accomplishments Gauge (some of the above names come from there)
Discover what other people were doing when they were your age
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"Too old and tired to get involved in politics? Tell it to 96-year-old Doris
'Granny D' Haddock. 