Adding Life to Years
(See Cover)
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off . . .
--Psalms go: 10
Every afternoon last week a grey 1951 Chevrolet threaded through the streets on the edge of town, pulled up alongside the field where Stockton (junior) College's red-and-blue-jerseyed Mustangs worked out under the gentling fall sun of California's Central Valley. Out of the car stepped a trim figure in grey slacks and blue windbreaker. Under fluffy, center-parted white hair, his big, broad-browed head was thrust forward, turtle fashion. He looked old as he walked toward the cleat-chewed turf, but he shed his years like a mantle and straightened up smartly as the call rang out: "All right, kickers and punters," and the 39 players ended their scrimmage. Nine young men fell out and trotted over to the venerable newcomer. "Hi, coach," they chorused. Then one asked: "How about some kicking today, sir?"
The old man gave soft-voiced assent, and clods of dirt rained on him as the hopeful youngsters kicked. Suddenly he snapped to attention, barked at No. 84: "Head down, boy, eyes up!" Turning sideways he demonstrated the posture with fluent grace. "Relax, boys," he said easily; "don't be awkward."
What made this scene unique among thousands of similar spectacles on U.S. playing fields was the identity of the kicking coach: Amos Alonzo Stagg, who celebrated his 96th birthday on Aug. 16. It was extraordinary enough that Stagg, who was born seven years before college football (Princeton-Rutgers, 1869), had lived so long and punctuated his life with a series of brilliant firsts in several sports. But more remarkable yet was the state of his mind and body after almost a century of enormous activity.
Like a Youngster of 70. Despite a normal number of illnesses, and a back sprain that has caused discomfort off and on for more than half a century, Stagg is well enough preserved, both mentally and physically, to function as effectively as many a man 25 years his junior.
With millions in the U.S. heading for ages of fourscore years and more, Stagg's age and continuing activity pose a vital question for modern medicine: What is the secret of living healthily, happily and usefully in old age? How has Stagg done it? In fields unrelated to physical fitness, how has the same goal been achieved by other productive oldsters, such as ex-President Herbert Hoover (84), Senator Theodore Francis Green (91), and Manhattan Lawyer Charles C. Burlingham (100)?
The problems of old age have been be clouded by misconceptions since ancient times. The psalmist who hymned "The days of our years are threescore years and ten" knew nothing of modern vital statistics; the average life expectancy of an Israelite baby in David's kingdom was probably no more than 30 years. Not until the individual had weathered all the hazards of gestation, birth, childhood illnesses, diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia could he expect to reach threescore and ten.
According to the semilegendary Hippocrates, father of Western medicine, writing 600 years after David, the oldster's lot was not a happy one: "Old men suffer from difficulty of breathing, catarrh accompanied by coughing, difficult micturition, pains at the joints, kidney disease, dizziness, apoplexy, cachexia [wasting], pruritus [itching] of the whole body, sleeplessness, watery discharges from bowels, eyes and nostrils, dullness of sight, cataract, hardness of hearing."
With the addition of such refinements as arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and hypertension (high blood pressure), medicine remained in general agreement with Hippocrates until this century. The disorders so often seen in the elderly and aging were dubbed "degenerative," or "the diseases of old age," with the emphasis on "of," as though they were inseparable. The very word senile, from a Latin root meaning simply "old," took on a derogatory hue, and a doddering oldster was redundantly tagged "a senile old man."
Exceptions to the Rule. But every age produced a few men who were still great in old age. Plato, who overlapped
Hippocrates, retained his faculties until the end, died (according to Cicero) with "pen in hand" at 80. Michelangelo worked hard as chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica up to his death at 89. Titian, whose birth date is in some doubt, was about 94 when he painted his great Battle of Lepanto, was between 96 and 99 and working on the Pieta at his death. Izaak Walton compleated revising The Compleat Angler at 83. John Wesley was preaching regularly at 88. Benjamin Franklin was a power in the Constitutional Convention at 81, served as president of Pennsylvania to 82. Noah Webster did a new edition of his dictionary at 82, was busy on yet another when he died at 84. Verdi was nudging fourscore when he composed Otello and Falstaff, had passed the mark when he wrote his most diapasonal sacred scores, a Stabat Mater and a Te Deum.
But in the minds of both medical men and laymen, these productive old men could only be exceptions who proved the rule. Shakespeare reflected the widespread feeling of a hundred generations when he called old age "second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
No Monkey Glands. Today's medicine, having taken up the challenge of infectious diseases (the greatest killers of the young down the ages) and conquered most of them, comes now to the challenge of the processes called "chronic diseases" --a term with an unfortunate implication of hopelessness. Today's medicine men neither seek nor expect miracles. They put no stock in parthenotherapy, such as David tried when he took the young Shunammite woman to his bed--though the idea won medical-intellectual backing in the 18th century, is now suggested obliquely by Lolita and Humbert Humbert. Neither have they any use for rejuvenators such as the animal-testicle elixir developed by British Physiologist Brown-Sequard, the severing of the seminal vessels advocated around 1920 by the Austrian Steinach, or the monkey-gland transplants of the long-lived (1866-1951) Serge Voronoff.
Modern medicine has reversed the thinking of millenniums on the aging process and the aged. It holds that while aging is inevitable, many of the distressing changes so often seen with it can be palliated, minimized or actually averted. For this reason, Dr. Frederic Zeman, head physician at Manhattan's Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews, insists on a semantic distinction, doggedly calls these changes "diseases in old age," not "of old age."
Threefold Increase. Along with the development of biochemistry, medicine has sparked the speedup of a new science, gerontology. Properly the study of aging in all living things, and involving social as well as medical sciences, it has focused most sharply on the aging human since 1903, when Elie Metchnikoff suggested in The Nature of Man that "this science may be called gerontology" (from the Greek geron, an old man). In 1909 Internist Ignatz L. Nascher coined the word geriatrics (from geras, old age, and iatreia, cure) for the medical care of the old. Geriatrics has grown as a sub-specialty of internal medicine, but is not yet recognized as a fully distinct specialty--and many geriatricians think it never should be.
U.S. census figures provide wholesale proof of a mushrooming demand for knowledge in gerontology and for the services of geriatricians. In 1900 the life expectancy of a U.S. male at birth was 49 years, and there were only 374,000 Americans aged 80 and over--one in 200 population. Now it is estimated that there are nearly 2,300,000, or almost three in 200 population; nearly 1,300,000 are women, slightly fewer than 1,000,000 are men. Projecting present trends in death rates, the National Office of Vital Statistics predicts that by 1980 there will be 4,600,000 octogenarians, and by the year 2,000, about 7,400,000.
Though today's newborn U.S. baby (averaging the rates for white males and females) has a life expectancy of 70 years --a 43% increase since 1900--the remaining life expectancy of those who have already reached 70 has increased but little in the same period--from 9.3 to 11.2 years. This is because most of the life-saving achievements in medicine and public health have been concentrated in the younger age brackets, from the first few weeks of life through adolescence. The middle-aged have benefited mainly from the decline in deaths from tuberculosis and pneumonia.
The Spartan Stuff. To prepare for the oldsters whose sheer numbers will revolutionize not only the practice of medicine but also the world's social, political and economic structure, gerontologists turn both to their test tubes and to individuals like Amos Alonzo Stagg. From him and the men on nearby rungs of time's ladder they hope to learn what are the common denominators in longevity--and, more especially, in useful longevity. For they subscribe to the motto: "Not just to add years to life, but to add life to years."
Nonagenarian Stagg's life, though far from typical, may contain clues, for the observant gerontologist, to the secret of a long and useful existence. The first factor in Stagg's favor--though not to the same degree as in the case of some of his near peers--is heredity. Stagg's father, a cobbler who lived in West Orange, N.J., lived to be 73, his mother 79.
When Amos Alonzo, fifth of eight children, arrived in 1862 (while Stonewall Jackson was busy at Manassas), the family was so poor that every penny counted.
From earliest childhood, Stagg recalls, "we used to give one or two cents as our church contribution." Food was plain but plentiful: home-grown vegetables dominated the table, eked out with home-fattened hogs (whose bladders "Lon" used for "pigskins" and ball tossing). Lon swam and skated, got into one-hand and three-hand baseball.
By the time he began to work his way through Orange High School, Stagg was already a zealot about exercise--he ran the mile between home and school both ways. But he insists now: "It wasn't organized athletics--most of my exercise came from hard work, and I had plenty of that." He got much of it in the form of odd jobs, for as much as 25-c- an hour (a princely sum for a boy during the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes), plus helping his father to mow and cradle hay in the summer.
During high school days Stagg read about the youths of Sparta--"particularly the boy who hid a fox in his shirt and never batted an eye when the animal bit into his vitals. That book put Spartan stuff in me." For lack of foxes, Stagg decided that he had to deny himself, to give up something that he cherished. The something was coffee. He has never tasted it since. It was at this time, too--and Stagg remembers the date: May 23, 1877 --that this son of a devout Presbyterian family formally joined the church and decided to be a minister. "I became a Christian, and that made all the difference to me." From that moment he resolved to face life on his own resources, physical and financial as well as spiritual.
Subdivided Gum. Stagg was revolted by the drunkenness that he saw among his friends' parents in West Orange. "There wasn't one of my playmates who had a show in life, because their fathers drank every week," he says. So Stagg never drank. And beyond a couple of corn silks as a kid, he has never smoked. The one chink in Stagg's Spartan do-without-it armor is candy. He has always kept sourballs or similar hard candies on his dining table, has also allowed himself the smallest of indulgences in the smallest of ways: he cuts a stick of gum into three or four smidgens, chews one minuscule fragment at a time.
Lon Stagg was 21 before he got to Phillips Exeter Academy to cram for college, lived Spartanly for a while on soda crackers while he pitched the baseball team to victory. Then he saw his first real football game (Yale 6, Princeton o). Dartmouth College offered him a baseball berth, but it had no divinity school. Yale had one, so it was to Yale that Stagg went, aged 22, with $32 to his name. He always ran from job to class to garret--largely because he had no overcoat to keep out New Haven's raw, dank cold. He kept up this habit of running wherever he was going until 1957, when, at 94, he fell and skinned his nose. Said he last week: "I may get back to it."
At Yale, Stagg tried to live on 20-c- a day (10-c- for lunch, his main meal), soon wound up on sick call. The diagnosis: malnutrition. Reluctantly the young athlete conceded that he needed more than soda crackers and an occasional bowl of soup. He pitched the Yale baseball team to a record five championships. He played end for two years, making Walter Camp's first All-America squad in 1889. It was for the Elis that he invented the head slide in baseball and the tackling dummy in football.
By 1892 Stagg was installed as the University of Chicago's football coach. It was not that he had turned his back on the ministry. Rather he had decided that he could best influence the nation's youth by setting them an example on the football field. And it was a stern example that he set, for a record-breaking 41 years at this first" school (he won 254 games, lost 104, tied 28). No member of the squad was allowed to smoke or drink or be out after 10 p.m. To violate any of these rules was to break training--and be left off the team, no matter how valuable the delinquent player might be.
Coach of the Year. Chicago ungratefully retired Stagg in 1933. At 71 he blandly declared that he knew too much to be inactive, went to Stockton's College of the Pacific. His 1943 team there won him election as coach of the year and football's man of the year. Not bad for an 81-year-old. But Pacific in its turn retired him; so Lon Stagg joined his son Alonzo as co-coach at Pennsylvania's tiny Susquehanna University. Their 1951 season was the college's first ever with no loss, no tie. In 1953 Stagg became, as he remains, punting and kicking coach for Stockton's Mustangs.
Today Stagg and Stella, his wife of 64 years, live in frugal simplicity on the college side of Stockton. The living room is cluttered with the parchments, trophies and blackening baseballs of Stagg's long career. Stagg is obviously old and somewhat infirm: he suffers from Parkinsonism, which gives his hands a tremor--what doctors call a "pill-rolling motion." His left eye is half closed, following a minor operation. Yet he is incredibly hale. He recalls nothing of childhood diseases. Soon after he was married he had a bout with typhoid--a disease that few modern U.S. doctors ever see, though many oldsters now living had it in the days before water supplies were adequately protected.
In 1904, when he was carrying his five year-old son Alonzo to the gym, Stagg tried to leap a broad puddle. "In a desperate effort to recover my balance, I threw some bones in my lower back out of place." Stagg blames the incident for recurrent back trouble ever since. Doctors are not so sure. They grant that he has had sciatica--intense nerve pain running down the back of the thigh--off and on ever since. There were times at Chicago when it was so bad that he had to coach from a motorcycle sidecar or get around in an electric cart.
For all this, Stagg remains an active practitioner of the cult of physical fitness. He goes through a routine of bending and stretching exercises on awakening. He does pushaways, knee bends and chinning on an old fig tree in his yard, jogs around a small course that he has laid out from fig to apricot to pear-tree stump (about 100 yards at a time). He cuts his lawn with a hand mower, rakes his own leaves. His blood pressure is 135 over 90. The systolic reading is low for any man over 65; the diastolic is near the upper limit of normal--except that there are so few records of men in their 90's that normal is ill-defined. His pulse is a low 64, as it has been for years. (In highly trained athletes it tends to run below the 72 that is considered normal for the general run of sedentary humanity.) His weight, 150 Ibs. spread over a frame that now seems to have shrunk to about 5 ft. 6 in., has not changed in threescore years.
First of Everything. Across the U.S. there are scores or hundreds of men (and a few women) who "by reason of strength" have passed the fourscore mark under full productive steam, but their formulas for useful longevity differ widely in many cases from Stagg's. They are alike in that they have lived through the dizziest technological changes in man's history, and most have taken these developments in stride. To a child born 80 years ago, the transcontinental railroad, only nine years old, was a new thing. Electric power did not become publicly available until he was a year old. He was 17 before Marconi sent his first wireless signals, and he was 25 when the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
Among the wise old men who differ from Stagg on nearly all life's key issues are, aptly, two who have amassed huge fortunes from the auto industry--which, say some alarmists, is ruining the nation's health by eliminating the normal healthy exercise of walking. Appropriately, Directors Alfred P. Sloan Jr., 83, and Charles F. Kettering, 82, of General Motors, both proudly proclaim that they have never taken a lick of exercise in their lives. On level ground, the farthest they walk is from office or apartment door to car or from car to plane. Up and down, "Boss"' Kettering gets a fair amount of walking because he is too impatient to wait for elevators, walks up two floors and down three in offices and labs.
Sloan and Kettering are like Stagg in that neither has ever smoked, but not for his reason; they simply never got the habit. Boss Ket has a highball before dinner every night; Sloan toys politely with a drink in company, barely sips it. Where Stagg still lives on a fanatically sparse diet, Sloan and Kettering boast that they have no food fads, eat in moderation whatever is put before them.
The drives that dominate Sloan and Kettering are essentially different from Stagg's. Neither automan has ever been interested in reforming the world in conventional do-gooder style. Both have displayed a knack (which indicates at least a strong unconscious urge) for moneymaking, whereas Stagg, though usually underpaid, has turned down fortunes offered by Hollywood. Yet both Sloan and Kettering have turned, in advanced years, to philanthropy of a highly practical sort: the two are forever commemorated in Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute, research arm of Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases (TIME, June 27, 1949). Individually, each has set up a namesake foundation to advance the education and careers of promising young scientists. Sloan and Kettering are alike in enjoying superb physical health--better than Stagg's when he was their age.
Dedication & Stress. Evidently stress by itself need not be a killer, for there is plenty of it for a coach in Big Ten football. Certainly no man in big business has faced much severer stress than did Sloan as G.M.'s chief executive officer in the era of big unions, big strikes and the biggest war.
But one who can justly claim that no man was ever under heavier or more cruel stress and survived it in good mental and physical health is Herbert Hoover, 84. One of only five U.S. Presidents to have reached fourscore, and the first in 100 years,*Hoover endured not only the emotional torment of a presidency that spanned most of the Depression, but two decades of obloquy in which his name was equated with economic disaster and social injustice. A poor boy who, like Stagg, got his early exercise involuntarily, and a self-made millionaire like Sloan and Kettering, Herbert Hoover has long since dropped the daily gym exercises that won him fame as head of the "medicine-ball Cabinet." Still, his energy seems almost unlimited. He rises early, usually around 6:30, is at his desk in his Waldorf-Astoria office by 9:30 a.m., directing a platoon of secretaries and research assistants, writing manuscripts (most notably and recently, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson) in longhand. Though he naps for an hour or two after lunch, Hoover is far from having slowed his overall pace: he works seven days a week. Almost every night he has guests for dinner, which is preceded by two martinis (the only time he drinks), and he follows the meal with canasta, at which he is a whiz.
Spiritual dedication, though clearly not essential, appears to be a life-prolonging factor in many cases. Outstanding among long-lived divines is the Rev. Dr. Arthur
Judson Brown, 101, longtime secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, who was active until close to the century mark. And at that milestone, he was forward-looking enough to say: "I do not sympathize with the common lament that young people today are not what they used to be. Thank God they are not!"
And never in the 1,900-year history of the papacy has there been a clearer example of the life-giving powers of devotion to piety and duty (though there were longer-lived Popes) than Pius XII. Though he had been severely ill several times, and was eventually found to have a hiatus hernia (TIME, Dec. 27, 1954), he functioned with full efficiency well beyond his 80th birthday and until the strokes that swiftly killed him (see RELIGION).
Two men who have done much to help their fellows live longer useful lives are physicians who now share the benefits. Boston's Dr. Elliott Proctor Joslin, 91, top authority on diabetes, still examines patients six days a week at the famed Joslin Clinic, gets a big extra dividend from continuing practice because no other man has studied diabetes, or the same patients, for so long. Retired in Florida after 57 years of practice, Dr. Charles Ward Crampton, 81, still keeps his hand in as a consultant to the Geriatric Institute at the University of Miami's School of Medicine and its associated Jackson Memorial Hospital. Says Dr. Crampton sagely: "If a man has sense enough to realize that in many different ways he is not what he was ten years ago, and acts accordingly, he is 'way ahead of the game. Know your limitations--adapt yourself to them--and enjoy your privileges to the utmost." For such an old man, Dr. Crampton has coined the word "eugeron"--which well describes him.
Immortal Amoeba. Gerontology has confirmed that some of age's limitations are imposed by nature herself. One-celled organisms such as the amoeba, because they reproduce by forever growing and dividing, are the only true immortals. Man, like all other multicelled organisms in both animal and vegetable kingdoms, is foredoomed to aging changes and ultimate death. But the rate and nature of these changes are far from constant. There are wide variations even among animals of a single species in a state of nature, and naturally they are vastly wider among human beings, living under infinitely more varied conditions, not only social but physical, economic, nutritional and medical. In this fact lies one of the gerontolo-- gists' chief hopes: to discover why some men are biologically old at 60, while others like Stagg are still young at a far more advanced chronological age--then to apply this knowledge to slow down what now appears to be premature aging.
With the flight of time, some tissues become drier and infiltrated with fat. Blood vessels harden (arteriosclerosis). Muscles weaken. Bones grow brittle. Eyes and ears gradually fail, from a number of complex, minute structural changes. Ironically, the teeth--such as are left of them --become more resistant to decay in later life. On empirical evidence, Shakespeare anticipated microanatomy when he said that the oldster is "sans taste," for the average number of taste buds is 208 during the prime of life, but only 88 after the age of 75.
The layman's idea that because an automobile tire or piston wears out, so eventually must human organs, is only half true. In the youthful, still growing organism, cells divide rapidly, and all the components of the body (except nerve cells) are not only quickly added to, but also constantly replaced at the most intimate molecular level. This process does not stop with maturity; it goes on until death. But there is evidence that the rate of cell and tissue replacement slows down, until-- perhaps at different times in dif ferent tissues -- it is markedly less than the rate of natural death and destruction.
Then the organism, whether mouse (aged two) or man (aged 60 to 80, under favorable conditions), is going downhill.
What causes the slowdown in replace ment? Gerontologists cannot be sure, but their highest-powered laboratory tech niques are now concentrated on enzymes, those little-understood "organic catalysts" that regulate all the functions of metabo lism--both breakdown (catabolism) and buildup (anabolism). With age, a digestive change definitely involving an enzyme occurs in the salivary glands : they secrete less ptyalin, an enzyme that converts starch into sugars. Researchers believe that there may be many such changes.
The cliche that became fashionable ear ly in the 20th century -- "A man is as old as his arteries" -- may have to be revised to "A man is as old as his enzymes." Then, as researchers unravel the mys teries of enzyme chemistry, enzyme supplements for mature men and women may adorn the breakfast table, instead of the currently popular but cruder vitamins.
Bismarck's Diktat. Until that day comes, society as a whole and millions of individuals and their families will be faced with problems of aging at a grosser, more practical level. The trouble may begin at 65, when (thanks to a chance decision by Bismarck in the 1880s) most pension plans and many compulsory retirement plans begin to operate. For business, this cutoff point may be sound up to a point. Says G.M.'s Sloan, who kept administrative control until he was 71: "The rule is probably sound, because, while some men can stay in administrative posts beyond 65, most may not be aggressive and vigorous enough to do so. But many of these same men can then be useful in policy-making positions, where their accumulated experience counts." Sloan concedes that not all businesses have enough work at the policy level to absorb these men. For them, he advocates public service--not necessarily in politics, but in social and community efforts. There is, he insists, plenty of useful work that a man can begin at age 65 or even later.
But with the age 65 rule still operating blindly in most areas of the U.S. economy, practically every family can tell of a kinsman who was forcibly retired, then simply shriveled and died within months because he could find no useful niche for himself. To avert this, several big corporations now subsidize counseling services that may become available at any age after a man has qualified for a vested interest (usually after at least twelve years' employment) in its pension plan. Some companies actively urge employees to invoke this service at 55, then again perhaps at 60, and certainly at 64, to make sure that their plans for growing old usefully as well as gracefully are made well in advance.
Plan Ahead. The one common denominator that sociologists, psychiatrists, gerontologists and geriatricians see in all the actively productive oldsters of this or any other time in history is a keen continuing interest in some activity, which carries with it a revitalizing sense of participation in life. This may be, Sloan fashion, a continuation of earlier activity, but with a switch from administration to policy, or a new career in public service. It may be that a former avocation can be turned into a vocation. But "make-work" hobbies will not do. The oldster, like the human being of any age, must feel that what he is doing is useful, needed and appreciated. If his former hobby can be thus adapted, so much the better; e.g., an amateur part-time birdwatcher might make a contribution to science as a semiretired professional ornithologist.
But the aging citizen must plan ahead. He must stop feeling guilty over the fact that oldsters are alleged to complain too much about their illnesses. (Geriatricians argue that the aged, because they are less responsive to pain, are apt to complain too little, so that dangerous conditions go undetected until they are irreparable.) He must take advantage of the limited but growing knowledge that geriatrics has amassed. Dr. Zeman likes to quote Sir James Crichton-Browne (who lived to be 97): "There is no short cut to longevity. To achieve it is the work of a lifetime."
*The others: John Adams, who reached 90; Thomas Jefferson, 83; James Madison, 85; John Quincy Adams, 80.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.