CALIFORNIA : 95-Year-Old Teacher Is Still in the Swim

Swimming suits Rae Terran. It has ever since she learned how at 67. Now 95, Terran is still in the pool, still teaching an exercise class twice a week at the YMCA in Burbank, just as she has ever since she learned to do laps.

“Way back when, when I learned to swim, I promised myself, I said, if I take this fear out of me, I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking that fear out of other people,” she said.

And so it has gone for a quarter-century.

“What’s unusual is that in this day and age, everybody who does something expects something back. She does it because she enjoys it,” said R. Glenn Ford, 74, of Burbank, who has been a regular in the Tuesday and Thursday “aqua-size” class for the past two years. “She’s one of those people you want to clone,” said Karen Layo, who supervises pool and gymnastics programs at the YMCA.

Terran has never asked the Y for a dime.

“From time to time I’ve had to say to them that I didn’t come here for that,” she said. “I came here to volunteer.”

She started going to the YMCA in the late ‘60s, when she was in her late 60s, to solve a personal dilemma.

She had a happy marriage. She and her husband, Al, who worked in the construction business, had a home in Burbank. They had four children. But she felt she had missed out--on the cold, crisp rivers and lakes in her native New York, then the Pacific Ocean when she and her husband moved west. She had always loved to play outside, especially with the children--but she was terrified of water.

“I couldn’t even take a bath in a full tub of water,” Terran said. “You know how people love to submerge in a tub full of warm water, just relax? I couldn’t do it. I was afraid I’d suffocate.

“That’s what pushed me to learn to swim. I said, I’m either going to learn or I’m going to sink. Then I thought: If I sink, someone will pick me up.

“Well, I haven’t sunk, and I’m still here.”

Once in the swim of things, Terran volunteered to teach others her newfound skills. And she took on leadership of the aqua-size class, designed especially for senior citizens or others who want exercise, or who are under doctor’s orders to work out but need a warm pool to cushion the stress of exertion.

Just as she did back in the ‘60s, Terran takes the bus to the pool. And as always, someone in the class volunteers to drive her home.

“I’ve seen so many beautiful, friendly people coming in and out of that Y that you could cry sometimes,” she said.

She is forever cajoling her pupils not to dip a toe in the water, but to take the plunge. Immediately.

“She always jumps right in. Boom!” said another class regular, Lori Crawford, 68, of Burbank.

Is Rae Terran going to keep doing this until she dies?

“Yes, I will,” she said. “They’ll pick me up, and I’ll be all clean, all warm, in the nice clean water. There’s no better place.”