The Third Age

Most of the sportsclub members work out in a gym at least once a week. Many hike regularly, bowl, ride bikes or swim. Others ski cross-country, sometimes covering as many as twelve miles a day. Nothing remarkable about this--except that the sportsmen and women are all at least 62, and some are more than 90. Their club is just one part of an unusual city-run program in Grenoble, France, designed to help the aged rediscover their youth and zest for life through physical, social and artistic activity.

Conceived by French Doctor Robert Hugonot and Philosopher Michel Philibert, a Grenoble Office of Aged Persons was established by Socialist Mayor Hubert Dubedout when he took office in 1965. It has since attracted worldwide attention from behavioral scientists and others interested in the emotional as well as the physical well-being of the aged. The program is a particularly useful model for U.S. study. The reason: France has long had a low birth rate and now has a higher percentage of people over 65 than the U.S. (14% compared to 10%). With the recent drop in the U.S. birth rate, the U.S. population too is becoming older.

Hugonot and Philibert call their plan "integration of the third age." Its goal, they explain, is to help members of the third age--society's retired citizens--rejoin those of the first and second ages--students and working people. It also seeks to reclaim oldsters in the fourth age--the dependent and handicapped--by making them independent again. The Grenoble concept is quite different from that of age-segregated U.S. retirement villages, which, Hugonot says, "are not a satisfactory solution because they do not integrate old people with other age groups." In Grenoble there is a program of "integrated lodging," under which one of ten apartments in new buildings is reserved for older people. Such buildings include attractive, low-cost dining rooms where the residents eat together around intimate small tables.

To keep the elderly in touch with the world around them, the Office of Aged Persons, or OGPA, as it is known in France, publishes a monthly news bulletin for the elderly and puts on a weekly radio show. It also staffs a walk-in information center to provide counsel on social security, law and housing, and operates a telephone hot line for the same purpose. In addition, there is a free mobile health clinic whose doctors rely at least as much on their own warm human concern as on impersonal diagnostic procedures. "X rays can't disclose nervous depression," points out Medical Team Director Madeleine Causse.

Throughout the program, emphasis is on stimulating the elderly to make their own lives happier. "Old people often believe themselves pushed aside, forgotten. But they do it to themselves," Hugonot recently told an audience of aged men and women. "Sitting makes you atrophy physically," he went on, "and watching TV soap operas does nothing much to exercise your brain. That can atrophy, too. The less you move around in the world and use your brain, the less you communicate with other human beings and the more you're alone." Hugonot is against passive acceptance of the supposed infirmities of age. "You think you've been losing your memory lately? Try exercising your lungs along with the rest of your body. go out into a forest and breathe deeply. You'll find your memory returning, your handwriting becoming steadier."

One focus of activity is a group of clubs d'animation or vitality clubs that meet in age-integrated apartment houses or former youth centers, recently renamed maisons pour tons--houses for all. With several generations sometimes joining in, the 6,000 club members go on excursions, hold parties and attend arts-and-crafts classes taught by trained OGPA instructors. They also run bazaars to sell the products of their newly developed skills, using the profits to help finance visits to local museums, French mountain resorts and even foreign countries. Last year a branch of OGPA called the Third Age Travel Agency arranged a three-week trip for 300 oldsters to the Balearic Islands. The cost: just $130 each. This year the agency plans a tour of Tunisia.

For the moment, Hugonot and Philibert are concentrating on re-educating the elderly to think young, but they have ambitious--if still somewhat amorphous--plans for reforming society to make re-education unnecessary. "Today's distribution of periods for education, work and leisure is absurd," Philibert explains. "A child spends 20 years in school, and at the end he never wants to study again. As an adult, he spends 30 years at work, usually doing something that requires no creativity. When he finally retires after this life of stagnation, small wonder that cerebral and physical atrophy set in. Education should be continuous, beginning at birth and lasting a lifetime. Then we would all arrive at old age in much better psychological condition and not slide prematurely into the fourth age."

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