Local Delegates Join White House Conference on Aging

Neel Buell, a semi-retired resident of Fountain Valley, believes senior citizens need to keep educating themselves just to get by in today’s society.

“People used to think education was like the measles,” Buell said. “You were exposed to it at an early age, and somehow you got over it.”

Peggy Weatherspoon of Anaheim fears that the plague threatening seniors is alcoholism, a disease just as prevalent in the elderly as Alzheimer’s, but one that receives little public attention.

The two are among 11 Orange County residents who are delegates to the once-a-decade White House Conference on Aging in Washington this week.

While debates over how to save Medicare from bankruptcy have consumed the meeting, each of the county’s delegates has come with a personal agenda. They are trying to incorporate their concerns into the group’s recommendations to Congress and the President. The 2,250 delegates will vote on the recommendations today.

Many of the delegates are retirees, while others work with the elderly and have a perspective on the needs.

Robert Wiswell of Seal Beach, who chairs the University of Southern California’s Department of Exercise Science, is trying to win support for a resolution to raise awareness of the role physical fitness and nutrition play in seniors’ quality of life.

The conference’s prepared agenda, set by the White House, neglected the issue, he said, and Wiswell needs 230 signatures to get his proposal on the ballot.

The conference is the biggest policy-setting meeting for senior citizens. Proposed resolutions address a broad range of topics, from Medicare and Social Security to housing, support services and quality of life.

For Patricia Trotter, the meeting was a chance to have input into policies affecting seniors, something she finds hard to do in California. Trotter supervises community services at a senior center in Fullerton.

“I feel we’ve been left out of the policy-making,” Trotter said.

Her main objective is to convince others the importance of maintaining senior centers and making them a central location for services.

Some Orange County delegates viewed the conference as an opportunity to defend the image of seniors. Warren Diaz, a Fountain Valley retiree, said the debate over Medicare, and its drain on the federal budget, is placing the blame on seniors for the government’s fiscal woes.

“We don’t want to see the seniors blamed for the deficit,” Diaz said.

Buell, who attended two previous conferences in 1971 and 1981, also said many young people view seniors as “greedy old geezers” who convened the conference to grab more from the federal government.

On the contrary, Buell said he was leery of supporting resolutions that ask for more benefits or services from the government, especially if they would compound the current debt. The point of seniors’ activism is to help future generations, he said.

“We’re here to prepare the way,” Buell said. “Not to see what we can gain, but to see what we can do for the generation that follows.”