The Sky’s the Limit

Mildred Hunter has always wanted to soar. But what with one thing and another (two marriages, raising a child and full-time work) she never got the chance.

So five years ago, at 75, Hunter took the plunge. She began skydiving in tandem with her son, Bob.

“It’s so exciting each time that I can hardly wait to go back,” Hunter reports from a Houston hospital bed--where she’s nursing a broken leg acquired in her most recent parachute jump. Within the last year, the 80-year-old Hunter has also gone up in a hot air balloon, taken a glider ride and ventured aloft in a paraplane.

“I’m going to live it up as much as I can for as long as I can,” she says. “My age has nothing to do with it.”

Hunter is representative of thousands of the venturesome mature, part of what may be called the “new old” population of America. These are the millions of people who have passed well beyond the half-century mark and don’t think twice about it. Blessed with good health, they continue to do what they’ve always done, or what they’ve always wanted to do.

They are surprising even the experts who have been predicting all this.

Dr. Terrie Wetle was skiing down an Oregon mountainside recently and stopped at a lodge for food.

“I saw this bunch of old people finishing lunch. They looked to be in their 70s and 80s,” Wetle says. “I watched them leave, put on their skis, and go down that big mountain so beautifully that I was amazed. It was a kind of confirmation.”

Wetle, 51, is a grandmother, gerontologist and deputy director of the National Institute on Aging. She intends to ski “for another 20 or 30 years” and believes she’ll be part of a crowd of her peers.

Because despite the snipes and jeers of the under-50 set, those who have passed that mythical landmark are shining in all sorts of activities and sports, extreme and otherwise.

Is America ready for that? No way. After Sonny Bono died on the slopes at 62, and Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) announced that he’ll travel into space again at 77, radio talk shows were awash with jokes and comments from listeners repulsed that “geezers” are risking their lives in such dangerous ways. One caller couldn’t understand why old people, “who’ve already had their day,” would do anything risky at all. “What are they trying to prove?”

He can be forgiven for not understanding. On one hand, America is aware that people are living longer, healthier lives with every passing decade (life expectancy has climbed to 76.1 years). They know that with gene therapy and other breakthroughs, the longevity statistics will almost surely continue to improve.

On the other hand, many Americans still believe anyone older than 50 is old. Anyone older than 60 is very old. And anyone older than 70 is fragile, diminished mentally and physically, and should be on wheels, a cane or in a pine box. They believe it because the popular culture has told them to.

Most Americans have not yet heard about “successful aging,” a concept born 10 years ago as the result of a research program supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Dr. John D. Rowe, the principal investigator, concluded that medical research has placed too much emphasis on the deficits that come with aging and were always thought to be caused by the aging process itself.

Rowe showed, through various studies, that these declines may really be explained in terms of lifestyle, habits, diet and an array of psychosocial factors having nothing to do with the aging process.

In other words, while getting old does cause physiological changes of all sorts, it does not cause the mental and physical declines that have always been associated with age, he says. If no disease is present, a healthy old person can be expected to continue the same activities as when he or she was younger, although not necessarily on the same level.

“A revolutionary increase in life span has already occurred,” Rowe wrote in a 1987 Science magazine article. “A corresponding increase in health span and the maintenance of full function as nearly as possible to the end of life” is the goal doctors and older Americans must now set for themselves.

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Bill Jones is already on this course. At 66, he climbs mountains, skis, skydives and is an active rancher in Utah. He flies planes for business and pleasure, and just bought an airport in Alaska, where he plans to start a tourist business.

“I don’t perceive myself as young or old. I am what I am--an active, interested person. I see no reason not to continue to be that,” he says. “Of course, I can’t bench press 300 pounds anymore, but I can certainly continue to function in the world I’ve created for myself. You don’t die when you hit 60. People ask me all the time, ‘Are you still doing all that?’ I say of course. And I plan to continue.”

So does Patrick Moorehead, 66, of Long Beach. He is president of Skydivers Over 60, a group formed in 1992 “as a kind of lark.” It now has more than 400 members, he says. Moorehead retired at 50 from his job as a fire department battalion chief “because the job was inherently dangerous.” But he maintains his lifestyle, including a healthy diet and regular exercise--both mental and physical--and he jumps at least 10 times a month and participates in skydiving competitions all over the world.

Moorehead says he’s “frankly disappointed in the amount of people that succumb to advancing years. My wife and I just got back from Las Vegas. We saw so many people who have let themselves deteriorate, who seem to have no interest in physical activity that will keep them healthy and in shape. They are doing themselves a disservice,” he says, because “they perceive themselves as society perceives them. They think once you get past that certain milestone that society calls old age, you must back down from life. What a waste.”

Dr. Robert Butler, founding director of the National Institute on Aging and now chief executive of the International Longevity Center and professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, agrees.

“I remember George Bush’s skydive, at 72, got so much attention that I was asked to discuss it on TV shows,” Butler says. “But the truth is many people much older than Bush are doing the same or similar things. It’s not talked about because it’s still not socially acceptable” to be so active at an advanced age, Butler says.

“Although our population is growing older, the rates of disability are declining. In other words, people are vigorous and healthy longer than they used to be. Someone 80 today may be the equivalent of a 60-year-old in the last century. Part of the decline is physiological. But the big constraint is sociological,” he says. That’s because the reaction of people is still relatively negative, Butler says.

“My point is, the sociology may not yet have caught up with the physiology. An older person has to be very careful about being looked upon as too sexy, or too vigorous, or too interested in life because society may frown upon such people.”

The experts seem to agree that America is in a state of transition. The “old old” group still sees themselves as they used to see their own grandparents: frail and decaying. Many who have had a lifetime of poor nutrition and little physical activity accept as inevitable the physical consequences of their choices and incorrectly consider the results to be a normal part of aging.

The “new old” population consists of people who have led active and healthy lifestyles, who have benefited from recent medical advances or are simply genetically blessed with good health in advanced age. They are the cutting edge of what experts say will soon be considered the norm.

The theory of “successful aging” is not just a theory, Butler says. It’s happening quietly every day. “Consider this: On any given day in America, of all our population over 65, 81% are doing more than OK physically.” By that he means, they are independent and fully functional.

And gerontologist Wetle reports that “the old assumption that loss of mental abilities is a natural part of aging has now been proven false. We now know that some people lose memory and the ability to reason, but those losses are always caused by disease.” The primary and growing example of this is Alzheimer’s disease. Those with no disease do not lose their faculties in old age, she says, although society believes otherwise. And as medical science is able to eradicate more age-associated disease, an even bigger segment of the population will retain full faculties into very old age, she predicts.

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Robert Ward Parker, 75, maintains status quo on all fronts. The Santa Fe, N.M., resident lives minutes from the mountains, where he skis “a minimum of twice a week,” often with a group of men who are his age or older. His friend Robert Nordhaus, 88, skied with him until this year, when a “minor physical setback” took him off the slopes.

A member of the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army during World War II, Parker was in the elite force that fought on skis in mountain terrain. The members of the 10th have remained buddies and athletes ever since, with many of them instrumental in founding outdoor survival groups and such ski resorts as Vail, Colo., Parker says.

In 1995, he organized his buddies for a trip to Europe, where they repeated climbing a 2,000-foot mountain in the Appenines; they climbed it the first time in 1945.

“Seven veterans, ages 72 to 80, climbed to the top again,” Parker says. This time they were joined in friendship by some of the German and Italian mountain troops they had once fought. “It was a wonderful experience,” he says.

He also rock climbs, writes poetry and engages in what he calls “independent archeological research that involves miles and miles of walking in rough country, usually by myself. I’ve made three discoveries that no one else has made in this state where so many archeologists are working,” he says with pride. These days, he’s working on an “astrological alignment of stone structures in eastern New Mexico.” If he confirms the alignments, he’ll submit the data to an archaeo-astronomical journal, he says.

His view of aging? “I think of myself as maybe 35. My body functions as if I were a normal 55-year old. And mentally, I’m still a teenager in terms of wanting to explore the world.”

Parker and so many others like him are what Butler predicts will be typical of old people in America’s very near future.

“When the baby boomers reach Golden Pond, they are going to transform the image of old age. It will be a much more vigorous, active and vibrant period of life,” Butler says. “The boomers will be physically active and continue to work longer. We can’t have 40 million people sitting around doing nothing. It’s a waste. That’s really the main point of all this.

“It’s not just skiing and jumping out of planes--but continuing to contribute to our society. Have you heard about the airline pilots? They’re fighting to fly past the age of 60.”