Fitness Teacher Helps the Elderly Tune Up Bodies

You should hear Dorothy White when she admonishes older people to lead healthier lives.

“I like to inspire people, especially people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired,” said White, who teaches nutrition and exercise to the elderly. Her double-entendre class title is “It’s All Behind You Now.”

And talk about an unabashed role model. “I exemplify what I teach,” said White, 72, who weighs 135 pounds, stands 5 feet, 7 1/2 inches tall, walks two miles every day, lifts weights and struts around and talks like someone half her age.

She learned her craft working “fat farms” in Mexico, Hawaii and the United States. She said they are now called health and fitness live-in spas.

Not one to mince words, White, of Costa Mesa, who teaches at the Oasis Senior Citizens Center in Corona del Mar, said: “I tell the class we’re not talking about weight loss. We’re talking about change of weight, and I’m not giving them a snow job.”

She said that she doesn’t like to use negative words and that loss is one of them. “It’s like having something taken from you,” she said.

White tells her class of 35, which meets weekly for 45 minutes of nutrition information and 45 minutes of exercise, that “all that fattening stuff that tastes so good going down only makes you feel sluggish, lethargic, listless and heavy.”

On the other hand, she said, “eating nutritionally gives you more energy, your thinking is sharper and you become more creative.”

And she added: “I’m talking about being fit instead of fat.”

White said that she thinks dieting doesn’t work but that if older people change their eating habits, the weight will take care of itself. She said: “We talk about a change in weight brought about through learning how to eat nutritionally.” But she warned: “That means you won’t see a change overnight.”

Eating nutritionally, she explained, means consuming more carbohydrates, less fat and less red meat. She said the elderly should try to stop using medicine. “I’ll say 60% of the medication doesn’t work. I gave it all up.”

Instead, she said, it is more advantageous for seniors to “learn how to become acquainted with their own body and their own needs.”

White said she can already see changes in her class members. “Their cheeks are pinker, and they have a spring in their step.”

White, dressed in a workout outfit for her daily weight-lifting exercise, said: “It’s never too late to do anything. And I can prove everything I say.”

Sally Holditch had a good time at both of her 100th birthday parties--at Tustin’s Larwin Square and at the Tustin Hacienda Retirement Home, where she lives. A Quaker, she said she has yet to taste liquor, wondering, “Isn’t that weird?” She attributes her longevity to her farm upbringing and “simple, clean living.”

This is a touching story about Florence Nichols, 71, of Placentia and a tapestry that took 54 years to find a home.

It was in Wisconsin in 1933 when Nichols, then 18 and between high school and college, began working on the 3-by-4-foot tapestry, a gift from her cousin Claire Rossner to help pass the time. Nichols completed about a third of it before starting school. She gave the tapestry back to Rossner.

Rossner passed it on to another relative and that relative passed it on to another and then another, each completing a portion. Unfortunately, much of it turned out to be shoddy workmanship.

By the time 35 years had passed, Rossner, still living in Milwaukee, recovered the tapestry. But she became ill and sent it to a surprised Nichols--now living in Placentia--with a note stating, “I know you are the only one who would finish it.” Then Rossner died.

Touched by the note, Nichols continued the work. “First I ripped out most of what was done, and then I started again,” Nichols said. “I would pick it up from time to time, but it took 10 years to finish it.”

Over the years she would have her grandson, John Hawley, now 10 and living in Yorba Linda, sit under the tapestry and push back the needle she used to make the tapestry. It depicts a New England scene with a long pathway leading to a house in the woods.

Now completed, the tapestry hangs in Nichols’ home. “Someone offered to buy it,” Nichols said, “but I couldn’t sell it. It is too much a part of my life.”

Acknowledgments--Cypress High School senior Jessica Tiregol, 18, who holds a 5.0 grade point average in the honors program, will study for two months at Alliance Francaise de Paris in France because she won a speech contest sponsored by the French school’s Laguna Beach chapter. Upwards of 100 county high school and college students competed.