Computer Ageless : Newhall Matriarch Joins Growing Number of Seniors On-Line
In a quiet shopping center in Thousand Oaks, a college class in Macintosh desktop publishing has just gathered for its weekly meeting. Nothing unusual except, perhaps, for the 84-year-old woman sitting at the end desk.
After a lifetime of doing the unexpected, Ruth Newhall--matriarch of the Santa Clarita Valley town that bears her late husband’s family name and former editor of the hometown newspaper--is keeping to form by learning to produce newsletters on the computer.
Although older Americans remain the least likely adults to own or use a home computer, the ever-inquisitive Newhall has been jockeying with twenty- and thirty-something classmates looking to enhance their careers.
“Why not?” said Newhall, widow of Scott Newhall, the famous newspaperman whose great-grandfather pioneered the Santa Clarita Valley area in the late 1800s. “It seems to me learning anything whatsoever, getting a new skill, is always interesting and stimulating,” she said.
Nationwide, older Americans are plugging in and turning on computers. Nursing homes and retirement communities are putting their residents on the information superhighway. There is also SeniorNet Online, a national on-line service geared toward older users.
But those forays into high technology belie evidence that senior citizens with home computers remain a small, if fast-growing, minority. In 1993, according to a recent U.S. census report, just 8.4% of people 65 and older owned personal computers. Those users tend to be the wealthier and better-educated seniors such as Newhall.
Seniors who have taken to computers, some less mobile than they used to be, rave about their ability to keep in touch with friends and family members via e-mail, manage financial investments, monitor the news and even shop on-line from an array of vendors, experts say.
Computer use among older Americans will increase, researchers say. If nothing else, their population is growing as the country’s median age climbs and today’s workplace computer users become tomorrow’s retirees. But there is much debate over whether seniors with PCs will become widespread anytime soon.
Newhall, who will turn 85 on July 3, is the first to admit that she is not the typical senior citizen. Money clearly is not a barrier for a woman whose home is an ornate mansion in the Ventura County town of Piru. The 10-acre estate, 20 miles west of Newhall, has been called a “poor man’s Hearst Castle.”
Defying expectations is something she has done all her life, starting as a then-rare female student body president at UC Berkeley. She went on to become a reporter, author and college journalism teacher. With her husband, an heir to the Newhall Land & Farming Co. fortune, she traveled the world and ran the feisty Newhall Signal newspaper from 1963 to 1988, mostly as editor.
Today, once a week, she makes the trip from her home to the computer class, offered by the Chatsworth-based Learning Tree University, a private continuing education program similar to UCLA Extension.
Recently, Newhall attended the sixth, two-hour session in the eight-week computer graphics class. Upon completion, she plans to sign up for a more advanced session.
“I still have a lot to learn. I can do text pretty well, but I’m a real dummy on graphics,” she said.
Now on her third home computer system in the past eight years, a Macintosh Quadra 660AV with a 20-inch color monitor and laser printer, Newhall said she uses it every day, mostly for word processing. As for the booming world of on-line services, she said, “I don’t have time for that stuff.”
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Just how many seniors will follow Newhall’s keystrokes is unclear. According to the census survey, seniors who own computers remain but a fraction of the 25.6% of all adults with PCs. More recent studies show that the number of all adults owning PCs has grown even higher.
Yet the share of those age 65 and older with home computers did increase a tremendous 460%, faster than any other adult age group, climbing from 1.5% in 1984 to the 8.4% figure in 1993, according to the census data.
Some experts say the trend will continue as computers become an even more commonplace commodity and less intimidating to seniors never exposed to them at school or work. Gerontologist Douglas McConatha says he expects computer ownership by seniors to catch up with the national average within 10 years and surpass it by 2011.
“The Microsoft ‘where do you want to go’ slogan really applies to these people, because sometimes the only place they can go is down the hall,” said McConatha, a professor of sociology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, who has documented how nursing home residents benefit from using PCs.
Patrick Burns, a spokesman for the National Council of Senior Citizens, agreed that the potential is there.
“But it won’t happen,” he said, arguing that seniors, with an average income of about $16,000 a year, will be unable to meet hefty equipment costs and afford ever-changing technologies.
Newhall reflected on the irony that her husband, who died in 1992, never used a computer, writing his famous editorials on an old Royal typewriter. She often had to retype them for him.
“I used to grumble a lot,” she said, “about people being too stupid to use computers.”
