"Roctogenarians"

[fiefoe]

An amiable read. Mo Rocca's voice is soothing in its familiarity.

• I did my best to play the role of the middle-aged dorky white guy who grew up on show tunes, a role that comes naturally to me. (When we talked about his writing process, I cited my own favorite rhyme of all time, from the musical Funny Girl: “Kid, my heart ain’t made of marble / But your rhythm’s really horrible.”)

• At sixty-six, the Colonel needed to find a brand-new way to earn a living. (A similar thing happened to Norman Bates and his motel, but Sanders responded much more constructively.)  <> A few years before, Sanders had already experimented with franchising, providing his secret recipe and technique to a Salt Lake City–area restaurant owner in exchange for a regular fee. It was actually this initial franchisee, Pete Harman, who first used the name “Kentucky Fried Chicken”
• if it seemed a potential customer, he’d offer to make a meal for the staff, gambling on the quality of his own product. If, after the meal, the employees were still sucking the schmaltz off their fingers, he’d stay on as guest chef for a few days to win over the customers. Then he’d negotiate a deal to license the recipe and the technique. This itinerant lifestyle meant that Sanders was driving hours on end and often sleeping in his car—not easy for anyone, let alone a man in his late sixties who was by now suffering from arthritis. And despite all these efforts, after two years working as essentially a traveling chicken salesman, Sanders had acquired only five franchises.
• Grgich: But this was communist Yugoslavia, where any student could be an informant, and praising anything Western could get you in trouble with the government, so the professor initially kept silent. Finally, however, the students prevailed on him to speak. He leaned in, as if confiding a secret, and whispered two words: “California… Paradise.” With that piece of wisdom, Mike resolved that he would, one way or another, cross the Iron Curtain and build a career as a winemaker in America.
• The panel of French wine experts had placed three American Chardonnays among their four highest-rated wines. Even more astoundingly, the winner, with a score of 132, was Mike Grgich’s 1973 Chateau Montelena.
• The American victory was big news. If they had been tasting whiskey, we could call it “the shot heard round the world.” If they had been tasting beer, we’d have called it “surprise draft picks.” ... Brash, young upstart America had claimed its place on the world stage—thanks in large part to a fifty-three-year-old immigrant from a tiny village in Croatia.

• In other words, what makes honey not only delicious but long-lasting is the fact that it’s been through the digestive tract of an insect. (Beekeeper readers will notice that we refrained from calling honey “bee vomit,” since the regurgitated nectar comes from the bee’s crop, its “second stomach,” rather than the primary stomach where food goes. So it’s technically not vomit. But “upchuck” seems sufficiently generic and too good a word not to use.)
• Yixing Teapot In the city of Yixing, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive west of Shanghai, you will find a teapot that gets better with age. This Chinese city of one and a quarter million people is filled with artisans who make gorgeous teapots of a burnished cinnabar color. (Think spicy red-orange.) These vessels are unglazed and unpainted, and their porous clay is reputed to absorb the flavor of the tea, deepening it with every use... The magic of these Yixing teapots comes from the special clay they are made from, zisha, which contains kaolin, quartz, and mica, along with a high level of iron oxide.

• Estelle Getty: As she wrote, she played “Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, southern mothers, New England mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. I’ve played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun.” (For the record, we don’t know who Attila’s mother was, but it’s a safe bet she’s the one who called him “Hun.” How’s that for a cornball zinger?)
• Fierstein said that “Estelle became every gay person’s mother.” Later, when Estelle was a TV star, gay bars across the country would flip the channel over to Golden Girls on Saturday night so customers could cheer her on.
• Since Freeman turned sixty, he’s made something like eighty movies,
• Ruth Slenczynska: she showed me a necklace she said she always wears, a gold chain with a blue pendant. “It’s a Fabergé egg,” she chirped, a gift from Rachmaninoff himself. He gave it to her after she filled in for him at a concert when she was nine years old. (Not a typo. Ruth subbed for Rachmaninoff when she was nine.)
• Josef seized on this discovery and effectively canceled her childhood before it even began. By the time she was three, her father had Ruth on a strict schedule of up to nine hours of practice every day. “My father was on top of me all the time to work, work, work, work.” Even before breakfast, she had to play all of Chopin’s études.
• It was that same year, 2022, that Ruth, at ninety-seven, released her first album in sixty-six years, My Life in Music. “I thought I was retired,” she shrugged. But she was still growing. “Nobody’s a real pianist till they’re past sixty.… It takes that long before you get there,
• And so, in 2023, it was a Christmas miracle of sorts for Brenda Lee when “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” propelled by TikTok, finally hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, sixty-five years after it was released. (In other words, the song itself is eligible for Social Security.) Lee, at seventy-eight, became the oldest living person to achieve a No. 1 song in the U.S., surpassing the previous record holder, sixty-two-year-old Louis Armstrong for “Hello, Dolly!” in 1964.

• (It was 1890 when the Bureau of the Census announced the closing of the frontier. I’m picturing a guy in a coonskin cap with a musket showing up in the Oklahoma Territory only to find a “Frontier Closed” sign, then slinking off in disappointment.)
• What McCourt would later acknowledge was that in teaching others to write, he was also teaching himself. He didn’t fully realize it, but his long years of teaching were a gestation period, during which he slowly discovered in himself the creative talents that would come to fruition in Angela’s Ashes. In the classroom, he indulged his gifts as a storyteller and a raconteur,
• Peter Mark Roget: published his famous book of synonyms at seventy-three... The poet Sylvia Plath called herself “Roget’s strumpet” for her overreliance on the book.
• his most important medical paper, “Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel Seen Through Vertical Apertures.” (This part is actually quite interesting, so don’t skip ahead.) In his research, he had determined that the eye can still see an image momentarily even after the object leaves the field of vision. If another, slightly dissimilar image is produced in immediate succession, the brain perceives motion. This discovery, of course, underlies the science behind movies.

• Mary Church Terrell: led sit-ins at Washington, DC, lunch counters in her late eighties
• Wilson filled his cabinet with other southerners and effectively segregated the federal government. The old laws from the 1870s went unenforced and were soon forgotten. <> Under FDR things got slightly better. Government-run cafeterias and eating places were integrated,
• But since the judge had dismissed the charges, Terrell was required to head back to Thompson’s yet again—the third trip in six months. She gathered friends, entered the eatery, grabbed a tray, selected a lunch, and was denied service. New charges were filed against the cafeteria, and the lawyers got back to work.
• In the meantime, an election year arrived. In 1952, Terrell declared that she was switching political parties to support the Democrats because of their commitment to civil rights. The position of the Republican nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was equivocal, as he proposed leaving decisions to the states.
• The painting represented a major shift for Rockwell, who had left the Post the previous year when they wouldn’t allow him the freedom to say what he wanted with his art about the civil rights movement. After the painting was published, Rockwell was inundated with hate mail. But no matter. As critic Tom Carson wrote in Vox, “One of the minor marvels of the ’60s was that the period made Rockwell happier than he’d ever been. The hippies he came to dote on had a word for it: liberation.”

• Samuel Whittemore: The Centinel obituary praised him for his “manly and moral virtues,” and noted his impressive tally of 185 descendants. (Yes, he was a lover and a fighter.) Most of all, his longevity allowed him “to see the complete overthrow of his enemies, and his country enjoy all the blessings of peace and independence.”
• a two-foot-tall wrinkly green puppet that resembles an Indonesian pygmy tarsier (a small primate with giant eyes) with a few strands of Albert Einstein’s DNA spliced into his genome. (Special effects designer Stuart Freeborn drew on Einstein’s image, especially the wrinkles around his eyes, in creating Yoda’s look.)
• Ethel Merman:  that brassy belt in the 1930 Gershwin musical Girl Crazy. During her show-stopping performance of “I Got Rhythm” she held a high C for a full sixteen bars. (She would later write, “It’s been said that I can hold a note as long as the Chase National Bank.”)

• it’s women who still do more of the subordinating than men. Which is why widowhood can sometimes be an example of addition by subtraction. For these women, widowhood is by definition a late-in-life debut, comeback, or triumph.
• Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot: founded a champagne empire as a thirty-six-year-old widow
  She knew that Russians enjoyed champagne. She also knew that with the end of the war, the Russian market would, after many years, reopen. Finally, she knew that all the other winemakers knew this too. So, in 1814, evading her own country’s naval blockade, she smuggled her champagne to the Prussian port city of Königsberg (see the Mobituaries book for that city’s dramatic history), which positioned her to get her product to St. Petersburg weeks ahead of her rivals.
• Mary Granville Pendarves Delany: began creating classic works of collage at seventy-two
  Delany’s collages were extraordinarily detailed. She created remarkably precise renderings of hundreds of different plant species by placing layer upon layer of colored paper fragments on a black background, until an image of the entire flower, with all its shadings, was complete.

• Eighty-two-year-old Henri Matisse at work on his cut-outs in 1952.
• Borges: His unique education and travel led him to draw creative inspiration from international sources and traditions: Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, Jewish mysticism, Icelandic sagas, Indian philosophy, Greek myth. The themes that emerged from this heterogeneous curriculum are high-end catnip for philosophy majors: infinity, mirrors, mysteries, labyrinths, libraries, dreams, memory. The mingling of fantasy and realism, the travel between alternate universes, the pleasure taken in what Borges called “useless and out-of-the-way erudition”—all of it opened up exciting possibilities for later writers in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond.
• Because he worked on it in this way—measuring every line, every syllable—Borges’s later poetry has a formal, classical rigor, and shares qualities with the Victorian English verse he had devoured in his father’s library as a boy. In the words of his editor and translator Stephen Kessler, in the sonnets written after 1960, “Borges distills all the obsessive themes that pervade his other writings—the mirror, the labyrinth, the garden, the dream, the soldier, the hoodlum, history, oblivion, memory, ancestors, time, eternity, literary and philosophical forbears—into the gemlike form of fourteen tightly rhymed lines.”
• Borges came to revere Milton as an example of “a man who overcomes blindness and does his work.” Milton went blind in his forties and was forced to dictate his poetry—first to his friend Andrew Marvell, later to his daughters.
• I’m more accepting not only of their shortcomings but of my own and don’t torture myself the way I used to. That’s aging accelerated by hardship, and there’s enormous gain in it.

• Sam and Betsey Farber: A Gripping Story - revolutionized kitchen utensils in their retirement
  But the thin fins, so appealing for aesthetic reasons, proved a challenge in manufacturing, and many companies turned down the Farbers. Finally they hit upon a Japanese company, Mitsuboshi Cutlery, a knife manufacturer founded in 1873. Its history included the manufacture of samurai swords. The company produced the OXO implements in time for the expo.
• the real story of the OXO Good Grips line wasn’t just its popularity as a catalog of consumer products. It was the principle of what is now called universal or inclusive design. The idea behind universal design is that a product should serve as many potential users as possible.
• The great English architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723), who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Greenwich Royal Observatory, lived to age ninety. When he was in his sixties he designed the exquisite Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, and redesigned Kensington Palace and Hampton Court.
• Mimar Sinan (1488–1588), the master architect of the Ottoman Empire, who lived to almost one hundred and served three sixteenth-century sultans, beginning with Suleiman the Magnificent... his masterwork, completed when he was eighty-six, was the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, in western Turkey (near the present-day border of Greece and Bulgaria), whose magnificent dome rivals the Hagia Sophia in size. Three years after that, on the cusp of his tenth decade, he designed the Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic Bridge spanning the Drina River in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• the great Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, who died in 2022 at the age of ninety-one. In his eighties, he designed major works including the Qatar National Convention Centre (the sprawling steel beams on the exterior resemble trees—absolutely stunning) and Shanghai Symphony Hall, and won the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2019, at eighty-seven.
• let’s not forget these bad boys, still with us and still working: Rem Koolhaas (seventy-nine), Norman Foster (eighty-eight), and Frank Gehry (now ninety-five!). Just call them the Draft Pack.
• Wright: the Price Company Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, his first and only skyscraper, which he described as “the tree that escaped a crowded forest.” But the crowning achievement of his late career was the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the only public building he ever created in New York City.
• he had sketched out a wide circular tower reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel. The building was to feature panoramic views and a planetarium. It would be accessible by car—hence its name. The spiraling ramp that Wright had imagined for that site became key to the Guggenheim building,
• Construction didn’t begin until August 1956. By that point, Wright had been through six sets of plans and 749 drawings. He was eighty-nine.
• I. M. Pei is familiar to many, since his vowel-heavy name shows up all the time in crossword puzzles—much like Etta James, Yoko Ono, and, increasingly these days, Issa Rae.
• At age eighty-nine, he designed the Chinese Embassy to the United States; at ninety-one, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. But just as the prolific Wright’s last years are remembered for the Guggenheim, so Pei’s last years will be known for his renovation of the Louvre.
• John Hancock Mutual Insurance Company, which wanted a headquarters that would literally overshadow the recently completed Prudential Tower, home to their rival. The final result is a striking, sleek tower of blue glass that is still the tallest building in New England. But for several years the tower was beset by troubles, as high winds fractured glass panes, which fell onto the street below. The fault eventually was determined to lie with the glass manufacturer, but it was a major setback for Pei and his firm.
• he proposed a 70.5-foot-high transparent structure made from 70 glass triangles and 603 glass diamond pieces set in a steel-and-aluminum frame. Glass of the utmost transparency was essential so the structure wouldn’t block the views of the other façades of the museum. <> A giant modernist all-glass pyramid set in the middle of a stately French neoclassical palace in the heart of Paris. Who could possibly object?
• Yasmeen Lari: began building sustainable housing for the poor at age sixty-four
  Renouncing the creation of projects designed to serve the elite, she devoted herself instead to constructing basic living space for thousands of poor and displaced Pakistanis. In essence, she turned her back on the dominant values of her profession, in which the design of dazzling and expensive landmarks is the coin of the realm. She rethought her very identity and mission as an architect, including the kinds of buildings that she considered important, the kinds of materials she used, and the kinds of people with whom she collaborated.
• Lari insists that the construction of housing for hundreds of thousands of poor and shelterless families must be undertaken as a massive collective operation. What she calls “barefoot social architecture” aims, therefore, not only to leave a light carbon footprint but also to cultivate an attitude of self-reliance among underprivileged communities, especially women, by giving them an active role in the physical construction of their own homes and environments.
• Among Lari’s most influential ideas has been her 2014 design of a chulha, a traditional clay stove. Her version, which added an air-regulation pipe and a chimney, reduces the toxic emissions of the traditional stove that often caused women to suffer ocular, cardiac, and respiratory ailments and disease. The design, which she calls a Pakistan Chulha Cookstove, decreases the risk of fire and of burns. Because it is elevated and mounted, it does not wash away during flooding
• Today Yasmeen Lari, in spite of herself, has become a new kind of starchitect—less a Frank Lloyd Wright; more a Frank Lloyd Righteous.
• He also built several fancy hotels, including the Spanish Renaissance–style Ponce de León, decorated with Tiffany glass and wired for electricity by Thomas Edison himself. The New York Times declared in 1903, “There is no more interesting place in Florida than St. Augustine.…

• Ed Shadle: chased the world land speed record in his seventies
  A search began, and, in a Maine junkyard, the men eventually located a 1956 Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a single-engine fighter plane that had been used during the Cold War. From his time in the service, Shadle knew that the F-104 was “aerodynamically very efficient,” just what he needed for the body of the car. They bought it for $25,000.
• Capitalizing on their unlikely celebrity, Snowman and Harry started performing exhibitions. They would demonstrate the sorts of jumps required in competition, but, as the same round of jumps over the same obstacles became stale, they developed a new trick—jumping over another horse. NBA fans are familiar with a famous moment at the 2000 Olympics when Toronto Raptors star Vince Carter leaped over the seven-foot-two French center Frédéric Weis to dunk a basketball. Now imagine that feat—but with horses.
• But Snowman wasn’t the only one to do remarkable things in old age. As Harry got older, he seemed to take on the indomitable spirit of his favorite horse. He continued to compete in show jumping competitions, often against riders one-third his age. Someone gave him the moniker “Galloping Grandfather,”
• the build and proportions of a horse, what breeders call its “conformation,” are critical for success on the track. Conformation for a horse breeder is like design for an engineer: it makes high-end performance possible. And a horse born “back at the knee” is unlikely to give you high-end performance. This is a condition in which the horse’s knee—technically, it’s not really the knee but the carpus, but don’t worry about that right now—is set behind the top of the foreleg due to the angle of what is called the cannon bone. Breeders don’t like this condition: as the horse ages, it puts stress on the tendons and ligaments in the leg,
• Today he has eight hundred toys to his name. KerPlunk, Bubble Guns, Stompers, and Spin-Art are all his brainchildren. At 102, Goldfarb continues to invent, delighting in coming up with toys that will keep children of all ages entertained.
• Tootsie Tomanetz: When her husband had a stroke, they were forced to sell the business. Tootsie took a job as a custodian at the local middle school. But barbecue came back into her life in a big way in 2003, when, at sixty-eight, she took on the role as pitmaster at a brand-new joint, Snow’s BBQ. Within five years, Texas Monthly was calling Snow’s “the best barbecue in Texas,” thanks in large part to Tootsie’s pitmaster prowess.

• As Reiner once said, “Any movie that has the line ‘Secure the perimeter,’ you know it’s good.”
• The combination of edgy racial humor, cowboys, borscht belt shtick, fart jokes, Nietzsche references, and a postmodern ending—in which a western brawl spills over onto a Hollywood backlot and the sheriff himself rides into a theater showing the conclusion of Blazing Saddles—established the Brooks formula: high and low, zany and brainy, music and spectacle, disdain for good taste, and a loving but pointed send-up of film history. In The Producers, Gene Wilder’s Leo shouts, “I want everything I’ve ever seen in the movies!,” and that’s what Blazing Saddles—and really all of Brooks’s films—provides.
• He returned to The Producers, coming full circle. Teaming with Annie book writer Thomas Meehan, he adapted his own movie about a musical into a stunningly successful musical (which four years later was adapted back into a film).
• a song-and-dance spectacle, like the revolving human swastika of “Springtime for Hitler,” or Madeline Kahn channeling Marlene Dietrich in Blazing Saddles with “I’m Tired” (itself a master class in comedy; not a single moment of that performance is unconsidered), or the Busby Berkeley–style treatment of the Spanish Inquisition in History of the World, Part I.
• As the nation’s first Black president bestowed a medal upon a Jewish nonagenarian famous for fart jokes and Nazi humor, the United States Marine Band played a rousing version of “Springtime for Hitler.” It was a heartwarming yet surreal scene that felt like something out of one of Brooks’s own movies,
• The TV universe was dominated by rural characters and rural settings, and it blotted out the decade’s political assassinations, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War.
• Bea Arthur as Maude Findlay Bea Arthur always had a commanding presence. So it made perfect sense she served as a staff sergeant in the marines during World War II. (Back then she was Bernice Frankel.) From her earliest days as a stage actress in New York, her imposing stature (5'10') and voice (imagine if a smokestack could sing) set her apart. Her first big role on Broadway was as Yente the Matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof. Two years later she won a Tony as Angela Lansbury’s bosom buddy Vera Charles in the 1966 musical Mame. (Check out YouTube for the two of them singing it years later. Now that’s a match made in Broadway heaven.)

• Diana Nyad: Swimming with Sharks: swam from Cuba to Florida at sixty-four
  On her fifth attempt, beginning August 31, 2013, she encountered what were by now familiar challenges. The mask she wore as protection against jellyfish was rough on her skin and made every moment painful. Pushing herself to her physical limits, she began to hallucinate. Looming in front of her, improbably, she saw both the Taj Mahal and the Yellow Brick Road from The Wizard of Oz. (This scene is animated memorably in the 2023 film.) Stoll told her not to worry—just to swim around the colossal mausoleum.
• Of course, Nyad made it to shore, stumbling to her feet, sunburned and sick, her face puffy and blotchy, as crowds cheered her on. On the beach, colorful Pride flags waved alongside the Stars and Stripes. The sixty-four-year-old woman had triumphed where the twenty-eight-year-old had failed.
• And so, in 2006, Brian May returned to Imperial College to finish his thesis on interplanetary dust clouds, “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.” And while it may sound esoteric, it’s actually fundamental to the existence of everyone reading this book. As Dr. Tim Naylor of the University of Exeter explains, the study of interstellar dust “has its roots in a very important problem—the problem of how the planet that you’re sitting on today coagulated from dust around the early sun.”
• Tyrus Wong: The Wilderness No More - animator recognized as Disney Legend at ninety
  Though credited merely as a background painter when the film was released, Wong is now recognized as the artistic visionary behind the classic film Bambi. Yet in spite of a remarkable career as both a commercial and fine artist, it was not until he was in his nineties that Wong began to get his due.
• A Disney veteran named Dick Kelsey got him work creating Christmas cards for Hallmark; one gorgeous 1954 card, which depicts a tiny shepherd under a pink-blossomed cherry tree staring up at a star, sold over a million copies. A classmate from Tyrus’s days at the Otis Institute invited him to paint pottery for Winfield Pottery, also in Pasadena. The “Chinese modern” style that he developed possesses, in the words of one expert, “a grace and an ease that made his work really accessible to a large part of the American public.”
• Now in his sixties, Tyrus checked out books from the library on kite making just as he had checked out books on Song dynasty art fifty years earlier, turning his new hobby into a new art form. He held himself to an exacting standard, insisting, for example, that a butterfly kite catch the wind in just the right way so that it would move like a real butterfly.

__ Ezra Pound: he favored a poetry based on hard, radiant images, free of what he called “emotional slither.”