Is There Another Shangri-La Only 26 Miles Across the Sea?

One thing must be made quite clear: No government report on life style, lifespan, life expectancy, life insurance or the life of Riley has to date recognized the premise and promise of this story.

Further, the exploring John who discovered this rocky isle was Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in search of fresh water, not Juan Ponce de Leon looking for the fountain of youth.

A Doctor’s Dictum

Still, country doctor Bob Staff believes if you want to stay younger while living longer you’d better move to Catalina Island.

He says he has two dozen patients older than 90. Of the island’s permanent population of 2,000, “a couple of hundred are in their 80s . . . a couple of hundred more are in their 70s.” It is possible, Staff believes, that Catalenos live five years longer than mainland seniors.

There’s Mickey in his 70s who still climbs to trim giant eucalyptus with a handsaw. Whenever there’s a dance at the Casino there’s Hank and he jitterbugs at 86. Hubert daily walks the steep slope of Beacon Street and he’s 95. . . .

“In the 30 years I’ve been on the island, I’ve had 25 or 30 patients who came here expecting to die and they’ve lived for years,” Staff said. “Some are still swimming and golfing and playing tennis and surviving.” (A chorus of island residents sing the same tune, but first hear what the good doctor has to say.)

Dr. Bob (his preference) is precisely what any geriatrician would order--he’s 68, put together like beef jerky, makes house calls on a bicycle, doesn’t smoke, runs for fun and was swimming in Avalon harbor this month when even the abalone were crawling ashore for hot chocolate.

Red Meat Intake

Such a regimen--plus a red meat intake largely restricted to buffalo burgers--should keep any person healthy. Whether they live in Avalon or Alhambra. Staff acknowledges this. He also notes another undisputed factor of longevity anywhere. Fresh air.

“We’ve never had smog over here,” he said. Unless you count that smoky morning in 1982 after the waterfront Busy Bee Cafe burned down. “Occasionally, the Santa Ana winds will blow a few streaks of haze over the island.” On Catalina, that’s known as collecting Los Angeles’ empties.

“We often see this brown cloud coming out over the channel,” he said. “You can see Baldy and the San Gabriel Mountains poking through it . . . and you imagine all the terminal pulmonary cripples beneath it.”

For the pseudo-scientific heck of it, Staff likes to monitor the lung capacities of his patients. It’s one way of further proving the inarguable.

“Take a healthy, 6-foot, male football player from Avalon High School and his lungs will have the full, five-liter capacity,” Staff explained. Then our budding Refrigerator Perrys move to college and adult years and the hazy, smazy days of summer on the mainland. “They’ll lose a liter in the next 10 years. By the time they’re 40 they’re down to three liters and by 60 they’re gasping.”

Staff emphasizes that his research is all rule-of-thumb applied to educated guesses with only scant adjustment for the variables.

On the other hand, he does not establish himself as an august, Nobel-seeking researcher and is quick to concede the rural coziness of his 30-year island practice; the home phone number that’s listed, the parlor that doubles as an examining room with its cottage quilt and the Norman Rockwell prints and figurine caricatures of country doctors. Also a toilet seat used as a picture frame.

There are, however, some serious credentials back of Staff’s softness. He studied public health at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the 1944 medical degree is from well-regarded Tufts University and his specialty was orthopedics.

Then his move to Catalina and a personal hobby within the medical profession--an informal study, through seminars and by health education homework, of what makes seniors glow and keep on ticking. “I don’t think we’ll ever find the fountain of youth . . . but as long as the human being has a finite life expectancy, we should be able to push it a little further.”

But back to those basics of clean air and exercise. Also a low cholesterol, low sodium, low gin, no tobacco diet. They are standards of health nuttery in any community. They certainly don’t qualify Catalina as a Shangri-La of the Pacific.

“But our life style does,” Dr. Bob said. “Even if some of our healthful habits are of necessity. Meat, for example, is imported and that makes it more expensive. So it is much easier to become a fish eater, a proven health factor.

“Only 800 cars are allowed (by quota) on the island so we walk most places. Once you’re off (oceanfront) Crescent Avenue you’re walking uphill and that’s a cardiovascular exercise.

Noise pollution in Avalon is limited largely to barking dirt bikes. The last traffic fatality on the island may well have been 600 years ago when a Gabrieleno Indian failed to yield to an oncoming wild pig.

Ergo, Staff added, there’s little external stress on island residents.

“Why own a Mercedes where there’s no place to go, no place to park and a maximum speed limit of 15 m.p.h.?” Staff asked.

And as an added bonus, he said, no danger from high-speed auto accidents.

Also: “Remember when we were young and our parents used to say: ‘Never accept a ride from a stranger.’ If we said that over here, the kid would want to know: ‘What stranger?’ ”

So there’s a definite soul-settling relief from crime worries. Yet not a total release. Last week, said a spokesman for the sheriff’s station, a camera was stolen from a hotel room and somebody ripped off a few cans of beer from Safeway.

Gary Brown, 44, owner of an island bicycle shop, is a great believer in the health-giving subtleties of life on Catalina. A former high school teacher and coach, he fled the mainland after one 40-minute freeway drive too many. “For starters you don’t have that hassle (freeway commuting) here and you don’t have smog so yes, theoretically you should live longer on Catalina.

“It certainly is peaceful here. There isn’t a hotel room in town with a phone. It forces you to get away from everything. And I’m trying to think when I last got angry. Probably when I last coached basketball six years ago.

“You know, the average teacher who retires at 65 dies at 67 1/2. I figure I’m going to live to 94.” Buff Rutter has already made it to 75. He came here to mine conglomerate rock in 1934. He’s still working with rocks as bartender at the Boat House, mixing the frothiest margarita between here and Juarez, and well knows what’s keeping him alive.

It’s walking village streets without fear of mugging, druggies or panhandlers. Rutter, tall, fit, knows his next door neighbor by name. There are morning strolls to buy a paper delivered by seaplane, coffee by the pier with Joe Buci, another former quarry worker, and always something to do. “That’s it,” he said. “I have a reason for getting up in the morning and a lot to live for.”

Buci , at 64, agrees: “Every day here you relax with one big happy family. You know, if I were still in Philadelpia I’d probably be dead by now. From the fast life. “

Vince Scaramucci (“I’m 74”) and wife June (“don’t you dare ask”) have a unique theory about healthy years and more of them. It has to do with the panic and sloth of island business and, as an example, running their 10-room Hotel Vincentes in thoroughly seasonal Avalon.

“From Memorial Day to Labor Day it’s 18 hours a day, seven days a week,” Vince said. The ex-barber, ex-sailor, ex-Italian restaurant owner from San Pedro emigrated here in 1950. “But then there are seven months when you can close up, go on trips, play golf every day, hike into the interior of the island and just take it easy.

“Maybe that’s a healthier, more natural way to live . . . instead of working 9 til 5 with only two weeks’ vacation each year.”

June has another thought. In our rural yesteryears, life was happier and simpler and stress was a word used by engineers. People laughed in sunshine and ate ice cream cones and left their front doors open and smiled at strangers and talked to the cop on the corner.

“That’s exactly what we can still do in Avalon,” Jean said. “It’s rural America of 50 years ago.”

Larry Langin used to be that cop on the corner. Then he owned the oceanfront Catalina Department Store. Now he’s retired and playing tennis three times a week and giving lessons. They call him the Silver Fox. He’s 80.

“If I’d lived on the mainland I wouldn’t be in such good shape,” he believes. “Because there you have to jump into your car to drive somewhere to play tennis, wait for a court . . . and if you have to work that hard, you find something easier to do.”

Malcolm Renton came to Catalina in 1919. He’s 77 and a retired vice president of the Catalina Island Co. Would he have lived so long and easily as a senior executive elsewhere?

“Certainly not atop a 40-story office building in Los Angeles,” he said.

Renton’s regular Tuesday luncheon date at the Harbor Grill is Tom Wiseman. Also 77. Also a retired executive, but from the Security Pacific Bank.

“I remember the pressure and hassle and commute when I was living in Gardena and managing a branch in Santa Monica,” he said. “It was one of the reasons I was going to take an early retirement at 62.

“But there was an opening at the Avalon branch, I came here where life was easier and was able to work through to retirement at 65.”

Elders can be expected to have such realizations. But Kelly O’Brien has no such loyalty to seniority and the chipper of Catalina. She’s only 24.

“But whether you’re here (Catalina) or there (the mainland), being relaxed is beneficial to physical health,” she said. “And the inactivity of this place does tend to add to relaxation.”

O’Brien operates the Island Fitness Center. That’s aerobics and straight calisthenics and her specialities, competition weight training and body building. O’Brien is built like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thumb.

She trains here because she can concentrate here. When juices need stirring, Los Angeles and all things frenetic are only 26 miles away. “So I’ve balanced it out,” she said. “Getting into the action over there and then harnessing the inactivity here.”

Official measurements of life expectancy in the United States are no more specific than state readings. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, citizens with the longest life expectancy live in the Great Interior and Americans with the shortest are in the Southeast. But nobody seems to know why.

What’s more, Hawaiians are healthiest with a life expectancy of 73.60 years. Despite all the doomsayers, earthquakes, freeway bangups, mudslides, forest fires, smog and sushi bars, California is in the upper 25% of the class (16th place with a life expectancy of 71.71 years) and that’s way above Texas, New York, Alaska and supposedly sniffle-free Arizona.

Maybe, grin local optimists, the Rentons, the Wisemans, the Langins and other wiry old timers of Catalina are carrying a disproportionate load and upping California’s longevity rating.

Jacob Brody is one physician who won’t be tugged into such interpretations. He helped compile the federal statistics. Currently, he is an epidemiologist with the School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Still, Brody does say that moderation, reduced stress, rural living, clean air, community warmth, strong roots of an elderly family tree “plus a modicum of good genes” can produce “a driving force in the direction of longevity . . . and we can add to it, detract from it depending on how you’ve looked after yourself.”

Then what of a spot such as Catalina?

“The underlying thing here seems to be that if you can take a placid place, don’t smoke or drink, do remain away from the urban fleshpots, then you do seem to live longer.”

On the other hand, he said, there are areas of the Soviet Union, Tibet and Colombia where there have been reports of lifespans stretching to 120 years and older. Climate? Diet? Genetics?

“It has been researched ad nauseam,” Brody said. “One conclusion is that there are just more liars in those places.”

It should also be reported that not everything is fitness and oomph on Catalina. Dr. Bob does not deny the cancers, strokes, coronaries and emphysema that occur among his patients.

Despite a population far smaller than a regular Saturday turnout at a mainland galleria, there are some hefty drinking problems on Catalina, said community services director Ann Marshall, and enough to warrant the existence of a drug and alcohol awareness group.

Then there’s the silence and solitude of life on Catalina, a soul builder for some but a sanity-shredder for others. The latter relate such confined living to Alcatraz and Ile du Diable .

So does Dr. Brody.

“I couldn’t handle Catalina,” he said. “I’m too close to a Type A. I’d get bored out and die at a very early age.”