Elderly Will Get a Big Lift From Glenn’s Launch

Leaning on a cane, Jerry Lederer will walk stiffly into the hospital this morning to visit Sarah, his seriously ill wife of 62 years. Even as he tends to her, he predicts his eyes will wander to the television in her room.

At 11 a.m., America’s elder astronaut, John Glenn, is blasting back into space and Lederer, 96, of Leisure World in Laguna Hills, will swell with pride and expectation.

“He represents the desire to use space to advance the welfare of people,” Lederer said. “I hope his research will help people like me endure our struggles.”

Millions of viewers are expected to watch the televised blastoff, set for 11 a.m. PST, with as many as 300,000 more onlookers at Cape Canaveral, including President Clinton.

Across the nation, in the quiet of their homes and in scattered clubhouses and senior centers, older Americans will look on as the 77-year-old rocket rider proves to a youth-worshiping culture that courage and usefulness don’t stop with age.

“People see themselves in the imagery in front of them,” said Constance Swank, research director for the American Assn. of Retired Persons. In Glenn, “there is a sense of pride, of justifiable glee.”

Many people see him has a role model, others as a publicity seeker who used his influence to gain another toehold in space. But many of the 35 million people old enough to receive Social Security--and the generation right behind them--have plans to watch Glenn’s flight 36 years after the unassuming former Marine fighter pilot became the first American to orbit the Earth.

David Williams, co-founder of AgeNet, an Internet Web site for caregivers and older adults, is astonished by the recent barrage of activity.

Last January, he posted a short article announcing Glenn’s upcoming space shot. Over 10 months, the story received a scant 300 “hits.” There have been 2,000 hits just in the last two weeks.

To the young, Glenn’s excellent adventure might seem as strange as watching grandpa in a funny suit flying to the moon. Yet to those with some decades behind them, the exploit illustrates that older people too can still reach for the future and not necessarily dwell in their dusty memories.

“I think it’s going to break some stereotypes,” said Barbara Baldwin of Anaheim, who is active in senior issues.

She speculates that the county’s 70 million baby boomers--those born between 1946 and 1964 and stampeding through middle age--will identify in the aging space traveler their own yearning to redefine age.

“I don’t think baby boomers have expectations of growing old in a rocking chair,” Baldwin said.

Indeed, fortysomething George Searcy says he’s more excited about the event than the elderly people he is hosting for a “Launch Luncheon” at Irvine’s senior center.

“What Glenn is doing is refusing to bend to the cultural dictum that there’s a certain point where you stop participating,” said Searcy, the city’s community services supervisor.

He estimates that as many as 100 elderly people will attend the lunch-and-view, but “I’ll be the guy in the back of the room having the best time.”

“I have late 80- and 90-year-olds who don’t think of themselves as senior citizens,” Searcy said. “They’re just out there living their lives and don’t equate this with anything special.”

In similar modest little gatherings across the country, many seniors will eat snacks and sip coffee as that familiar face with the wide boy-next-door smile steps into the space shuttle Discovery for a nine-day space sojourn among a crew of seven.

At Del Webb’s Sun City in Palm Desert, fliers have been posted around the adult community to come observe the blastoff on the clubhouse TV.

“We’re expecting maybe 100 or so,” spokesperson Kristy Kneiding said. “People are talking about it, as they are everywhere. It’s history in the making.”

In San Clemente, senior center director Cathy Lee plans to tape the launch at home and rush it down to the center’s VCR in time for lunch. “I’ll be doing a noontime program on the ‘right stuff’ and the positive aspects of aging,” she said.

Seniors “look at him as an inspiration for their age group and the children look at their parents and great-grandparents in a new light,” Lee said.

But under the veneer of senior esprit lies a certain suspicion of Glenn’s and NASA’s motives.

Williams said among the e-mail he’s getting are some snipes that Glenn, a Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio who occasionally nibbled at a presidential nomination, used political influence to get a seat on the shuttle. Some grouse it’s flagrant PR for NASA.

“Being a senator, he had some clout,” said Williams, who uses his Web site (https://www.AgeNet.com) to defend Glenn’s selection.

Says one Web posting: “For the sake of discussion, let’s just agree that the flight is probably just a big public relations stunt. . . . Is that so bad? In our opinion, the fact that he’s ‘doing it’ is a powerful statement.”

“He’s not for publicity,” protested Lederer, who long ago worked for NASA and twice met Glenn, whom he described as “an affable guy, very serious.” Lederer hopes the research that is part of the mission might eventually help people who, like him, have troubles with their limbs and eyes.

“I’m 96,” he said. “I have one good eye, one good leg and one good wife.”

Glenn had hectored the space agency to let him ride along to conduct experiments on aging in hopes of, as Glenn has said, “preventing or delaying diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes and osteoporosis.”

Science, however, isn’t the sole appeal to the enormous community of older Americans, many of whom suffer age discrimination in the workplace.

“If Glenn does anything, [he] proves that more attention should be paid to what older workers bring to the job--wisdom, loyalty and work ethic,” said Jerry Beigel, owner and editor of a monthly newspaper, Southern California Senior Life.

But in a more spiritual sense, perhaps the most sublime part of the aged astronaut’s flight, said AARP’s Swank, “is the sense that momentous events of our lives don’t have to be the ones behind us.”