‘Late Bloomers’ of December Rose : Organization Helps Seniors Nurture Old or New Talents

Even before the meeting began, Vance Price’s feet were tapping to a private beat. “I had 31 dance teachers before I was 65,” he said, for in younger years he spent most nights at public dances or private classes. “I wore my Capezios (dancing shoes) today.”

Price and his wife, Teleta, had come to downtown Los Angeles for a meeting of the December Rose Assn., a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping seniors pursue talents in writing, art, music and dance. The Prices’ bus trip from their Long Beach home took more than an hour, but the journey was worth it, they said.

A ballroom dancing session was scheduled to follow the association’s business meeting. So Vance and Teleta were ready and waiting.

Vance is 83 and Teleta is 76, but they don’t seem to have slowed much with age. They said they spend three or four days a week at a Long Beach senior center, taking tap-dancing and singing lessons, and each summer they teach a six-week course in ribbon flowermaking at the center. Vance, a former maintenance electrician, belongs to two writers’ clubs. He wrote and self-published a book of poetry from which he likes to recite, and sometimes he gives performances at convalescent homes and retarded children’s facilities.

Incentive to Travel

The Prices said they’ve attended December Rose special events for the last year and now that the new Heart of Los Angeles chapter is holding regular meetings, the couple may travel north often.

“We’re terrible housekeepers because we’re on the go all the time,” Teleta confided.

“People who are active and creative are so much happier and healthier than those who just sit around,” said Verna Harshfield, who founded December Rose in 1983 and is now its national president. She considers December Rose a “wellness concept.”

Harshfield, 71, is a former nursing home administrator for the Retirement Housing Foundation, a company that builds and maintains retirement homes. RHF, which is directed by Harshfield’s husband, Clark, provides most of December Rose’s funding as well as its office space within the Angelus Plaza.

Geographical Spread

Until recently, the Los Angeles December Rose office principally handled the organization’s national contests and publications. In January, however, a separate local chapter was formed and chapter officers were elected. Chapters also exist in Orange County, in Kissimmee, Fla., and Clarksville, Ind. The organization’s membership includes about 900 people in 45 states, England, Canada and Japan, Harshfield said.

About 200 December Rose members live in the Los Angeles area. Many are residents in the Angelus Plaza senior housing, but others live in the San Gabriel Valley, Westwood, Eagle Rock and North Hollywood as well as Long Beach. Heart of Los Angeles chapter meetings are held the second Tuesday of each month, from 2 to 4 p.m.

Ernest Fowler, 72, the Los Angeles chapter president, said he became involved with December Rose mostly through his job, which includes photographing and writing about RHF properties and residents.

Harshfield, who considers herself a “late bloomer,” said she did some writing in her younger years but most of her energies went into caring for a quadriplegic son and, later, working for the RHF. About 13 years ago, with her son married, she started writing more seriously, she said.

Arkansas Childhood

In 1976 and 1977 she produced “Totty,” a somewhat fictionalized memoir of her childhood years in a small Arkansas town, after a younger cousin “asked me to write down some family stories.” In 1984 the December Rose Assn. published the book. So far, 1,500 copies have been sold, and Harshfield said the proceeds belong to the association.

Harshfield also occasionally writes for “December Rose.” This publication, which premiered last year, is the association’s biggest expense. In 1985 it was underwritten up to $25,000 an issue by the RHF, money supplemented by revenues from subscriptions and advertising, according to Harshfield. The magazine is sent free of charge to many nursing homes and senior centers as well as to association members.

Membership in December Rose costs $10 a year, although those who join are encouraged to become “active” or “supporting” members by giving $25 or $50. “Membership in December Rose is suggested but not required” of those who submit work to the magazine, Harshfield said.

December Rose has sponsored several writing, art and photography contests. The winners’ work has been published in the magazine, which regularly prints articles, poems and stories by and about association members.

Contributing Editor

Gail Kirschner, Angelus Plaza emergency director and a December Rose board member, is a writer who “wrote a novel when I was 12--of course, you can’t read it; it’s in Swedish.” (Born in Sweden, Kirschner came to the United States as an adult.) Now in her late 60s, she produces the Angelus Plaza News and is a contributing editor to “December Rose.”

Editorial board members write free evaluations of all manuscripts received, Kirschner said. Although “a lot (of the material) is pretty bad, we try to evaluate it in as positive a manner as we can,” she added. Writers whose work is accepted are paid in copies of the magazine. Winners of a recent writing contest also received small cash awards.

Each May the association sponsors an art contest with awards up to $50 (although “I think what they (contestants) like most, rather than the cash, are the ribbons,” said Kirschner, who organizes the art show). An art exhibit of seniors’ work is on display through June 1 on the third floor of the Agape Building at Angelus Plaza. The awards ceremony will be June 1.

Photography and music contests also draw a lot of entrants, according to Fowler. Competitions are “the only way you develop any participation,” Fowler said. “If people just come in and sit around and talk, there isn’t any real involvement” in the December Rose philosophy of promoting creativity.

Painting Since 1970

Kate Pedigo, 74, is an Eagle Rock painter whose murals depicting community history decorate the walls of her hometown’s city hall. A former Otis Art Institute student, Pedigo said she began painting in 1970, four years after her husband died, when a friend who admired her photographs pestered her to take up a brush. Since then, Pedigo’s canvases have won about 20 prizes--including honorable mentions in two past December Rose contests.

Being profiled in the summer, 1985 association magazine led to her television debut on a local news program, said Pedigo, who also specializes in pen-and-ink architectural drawings. She likes December Rose because it has “given me so many opportunities” for exposure and companionship, she added. A similar view was expressed by Katherine Kemp, 62, who lives in the Hollywood Hills and has belonged to December Rose for two years. Kemp’s chief creative interests are writing song lyrics and essays. December Rose is “such a great place to spawn ideas,” she said.

Writing Workshops

Harshfield said the association may soon sponsor further writing workshops. December Rose has lined up two local writers to be “artists in residence” and conduct classes in prose and poetry beginning this fall.

Meanwhile, the chapter will continue to meet the second Tuesday of each month. (For information, call (213) 617-7002; for information about Orange County chapter meetings, write to P.O. Box 8189, Holiday Station, Anaheim 92802-0189.)

So far “it’s the magazine that really holds people together,” Harshfield said, although she hopes more December Rose chapters will spring up in the next few years. Banding together to promote their own creativity can “help give (seniors) identity, purpose, self-esteem,” she said.

“I believe so much in the capacity of the human spirit, in the God-given gifts of the human spirit,” she said. “I believe there is a creative spark in each human spirit which should be utilized and developed.”