Growing Old

...It is these areas I propose to explore in subsequent articles in this series...

...There was room for them in the house, there were plenty of chores for them to do, they could gradually reduce their activities while retaining a degree of usefulness which bolstered their self-respect, and their seasoned judgment and advice were valued...

...In 1900, death still claimed one out of every four boys and girls...

...This underscores the need for careful planning for aging and retirement, individually as well as collectively...

...Job standards are more rigid, skills become more readily obsolescent, and the older worker is no longer allowed to slow down gradually...

...The sole exception is the liberalization of the Social Security program voted by Congress last summer, but this measure would doubtless have been passed even if the Conference had never been held...

...There is surely no more telling statistic than this one: About 100 years ago, an average American family had to have twelve children in order to raise six to adulthood...

...Retirement is often enforced on the basis of arbitrary chronological standards rather than physiological and mental competence...

...In 1900 there were three million Americans sixty-five years of age and older...

...and the social—how older people are treated and affected by their environment...

...ONE OF THE biggest and most widely publicized affairs staged in Washington in years was the White House Conference on Aging, held during the final days of the Eisenhower Administration last January...

...We have made much progress in an area always considered beyond human control...

...If we could turn back the pages of time, even if only for two or three generations, we would behold a world immeasurably more saddened by the impact of premature death...

...Less sweeping, but considerable, progress also has been made against some of the diseases of later life, holding out hope of a still further extension of average longevity...

...Our present lease on life is three times what it was in ancient Greece and Rome, double what it was in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, and seventy-five per cent more than in this country a century ago...

...Longer life has had an increasingly marked impact on the age makeup of our society...

...Only one of every 2,500 boys and girls now dies between the ages of five and fourteen...

...By 1850 it had risen to 18.9 years...

...The present total of 5.5 million Americans who are seventy-five and over is expected to increase by nearly two million in the next ten years and to triple by the year 2000...

...There is already an excess of 1,500,000 women over men in the sixty-five-plus age bracket, and the feminine plurality is expected to keep on climbing...

...Only the exceptionally high birth rate of the past decade succeeded in holding the upward climb...

...For numerous men and women, their later years are a wasteland of loneliness and frustration...

...The Conference was scheduled and planned for nearly three years in advance, and was preceded by preparatory meetings throughout the country...

...What complicates the situation from the social and economic point of view is not only that there are many older people but that more of them are living to advanced ages and there is a steadily increasing plurality of older women...

...Sweeping changes in family organization have gone a long way to rob the old of a meaningful place in the home...

...How mightily the odds of life against death have been turned in our favor may be gauged from the fact that if the mortality rates which prevailed in 1900 had remained unchanged there would have been 1,600,000 additional deaths in the United States last year alone...

...A seasoned politician who has come to be known as "Mr...

...In those days the affliction of premature death and disability was a shattering reality in the average person's life...

...A life expectancy of the Biblical three score and ten years means that most Americans now live almost four times as long as man is believed to have lived in prehistoric times...

...Mass production methods in industry have adversely affected the status of many older workers by tending to reduce the value of skills acquired over a lifetime of experience...

...Since then the dread that a child might be taken by death has been lifted from millions of homes...

...This spectacular accomplishment has been made possible by two developments— the dramatic advances of medical science and our progressively rising standard of living...

...But in the same period the number of those in the forty-five to sixty-four age bracket has risen by 250 per cent and the total of the sixty-five-and-over category has gone up more than five times...

...The key to the aging problem lies in the fact that since 1900 the average duration of life in the United States has been extended by about fifty per cent, from forty-seven to seventy years...

...Rural self-employment and handicraft occupations once permitted large numbers of old people to keep on working almost to the end of their days...

...Quite frequently, retirement means a loss of status and self-esteem and a disruption of longestablished social contacts...

...It is this inertia, if not outright resistance to a realistic consideration of the problems of the later years, which is probably as responsible as the opposition of the American Medical Association for the difficulties encountered by those seeking enactment of the proposed program for medical care for the aged...

...But industrialization has advanced the onset of old age at the very time length of life itself has been greatly extended...

...To try to understand the full import of this enormously significant achievement, we must take a backward glance into the past...

...With the mass movement from country to city and the accelerating tempo of social and technological change, the aged have lost not only much of their usefulness but also a good deal of their family moorings and sense of belonging...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that today only twentyfour per cent of those sixty-five years of age and over are gainfully employed, in contrast to sixty-three per cent of the aged population who were in the labor force in 1900...

...There are two aspects of the process of growing old—the physiological— what happens to the functional efficiency of the aging body and mind...

...Greenberg is the prize-winning writer on medical problems for the Providence Journal and the Evening Bulletin...

...Almost a year later, the record of positive action to implement the Conference's recommendations is a virtual blank...

...It brought together 2,700 delegates from scores of governmental and voluntary agencies for a four-day talkathon estimated to have cost taxpayers about three million dollars...

...While there are many more elderly people than ever before, opportunities for their successful adaptation have been narrowed and there is considerably less use for them than in times past...

...Better means will somehow have to be found to provide decently for their financial support and to try to relieve their social isolation with its detrimental effects upon physical and mental health...

...The aged usually are forced to adjust not only to physical and mental changes but also to a radically altered social role...

...Even greater progress has been made for older children...

...Representative John E. Fogarty of Rhode Island, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health, Education and Welfare, who sponsored the legislation providing for the White House Conference on Aging, recently complained that the much-advertised meeting may turn out to be "a cruel hoax against our senior citizens" who had expected vigorous action from the new Administration...

...Public Health" because of his dedicated and eminently successful efforts to boost Federal appropriations for medical research, Fogarty is learning the hard way that while Americans are willing to spend more and more of their tax money for the eradication of disease and prolongation of life, they are most reluctant to face up to the far-reaching implications and heart-breaking dilemmas of a longer life span...

...But our society's framework for aging actually has deteriorated...

...Arbitrary retirement, which is becoming an ever more common procedure in American life, has implications other than reduction of income...

...While longer life raises a multitude of problems, it also is replete with opportunities...

...Within the past twenty-five years, the loss of life among mothers in childbearing has been slashed from sixty-seven to five for every 10,000 live births...

...T h e 1960 census revealed an average age of 29.5, the first decline in the history of our country...

...One of every eleven Americans living today has passed his sixty-fifth birthday as compared to one of fifteen in 1940, one of twenty-five in 1900 and one of thirty-eight in 1850...

...He has twice been honored by the Lasher Foundation for his distinguished writing in medicine.—THE EDITORS...

...Out of every 100 persons in the sixty-five-plus group, sixty-three now are above the age of seventy, and thirty-five are seventy-five or older...

...The control of bacterial infections, improved maternal and child care practices, and better hygiene and nutrition have enabled the overwhelming majority of Americans to survive the hazards of childhood and youth and grow to healthy adulthood...

...In 1820 the median age was still under seventeen...

...More than half of the women over sixty-five are widowed, as against only twenty-four per cent of men in the same bracket who are widowers...

...One of every six men and women in the sixty-five-andolder group is on relief...

...Many people have such a deep emotional investment in their work that its relinquishment calls for a major readjustment...

...Somehow—if only because growing old is our common destiny—we have to create an environment in which the aged can live out their years with dignity and a sense of fulfillment...

...More than two out of three now draw Social Security or other retirement benefits, but in many cases the level of such payments still is far from adequate...

...It is a matter of vital concern for all of us to make more adequate personal preparations for the lengthening years of life, and to seek to create a climate in which the potentialities of older people can be conserved and developed...

...The twenty-three years added to the average life span since the turn of this century are almost as much as the human race had been able to gain in the preceding two thousand years...

...We have yet to adjust our sense of values, our ways of life, and our economy to the profound changes brought about by the longer average span of human life and to the needs of the vast legion of older people for whom the added years are far too often a period of stress and strain...

...The tragic irony is that while remarkable strides have been made in prolonging the average duration of human life and to some degree even in extending the period of physical and mental vigor, various social and economic forces have created new and formidable obstacles in the way of adjustment and happiness in old age...

...For all too many people, old age now means inadequate income, poor or marginal health, improper housing, isolation from family and friends, the discouragement of being shunted aside from the mainstream of life...

...Fewer than three babies out of every one hundred now are lost before they are a year old...

...This will increasingly magnify the problem of economic dependency, for while there has been some increase in recent years in the employment of older women, job opportunities open to them remain extremely limited...

...In 1900 it was 22.9, and by 1950 had reached 30.2 years...

...Despite the advent of Social Security, the economic position of a large proportion of older people remains precarious...

...Women outnumber men by a ratio of 130 to 100 for those seventyfive and over and 140 to 100 for those eighty-five and over...

...With the breakup of the daily pattern of activities centered around his job, the retired person must find new ways to expend his time and energy if the abundance of leisure time is not to become a corrosive burden...

...The extent to which our nation has been growing up, in the most literal sense, may be seen even more clearly when we look at it in still another way...

...Latest available estimates are that the average money income of all persons sixty-five and over, including those living in families of relatives and in institutions, is only about $1,000 a year...

...The total population of the United States has grown by about 140 per cent during the past sixty years...

...Many widows are left in a precarious economic position, and the great majority of them face years of loneliness and frustration...

...In the days when our society was predominantly rural, the old could be fitted far more easily into tasks suited to their failing strength and more leisurely pace...

...Because the average woman marries a man who is three years older than she is and can expect to outlive him by at least six years, she can expect to spend nine years without him...

...Since then the number in this age category has soared to more than 16,500,000...

...The result has been most pronounced in the older age groups...

...When the first decennial census of the United States was taken in 1790, it was found that about half of the population was sixteen years of age or younger...

...This meant that a husband and wife had to plan on having eight children if they wanted to raise six...

...Neither Congress nor the Administration has moved in any of the areas where action is sorely required to readjust our society to the needs of the steadily mounting proportion of its middle-aged and older members...

...There has been a widening gap in life expectancy between the sexes that now amounts to more than six years in favor of women...

...It was a world in which it was a common occurrence for disease to carry off the young, in which husbands were often bereaved by the loss of their wives in childbirth, in which thousands upon thousands of youngsters were orphaned...

...The theme of the conference was the slogan, "Aging with a Future," and out of it came reams of resolutions calling for prompt and concerted action to make life for millions of elderly Americans not only longer but also healthier, happier, and more meaningful...

...Greater longevity has created a plethora - of such social, economic, and personal problems as dependency and invalidism, employment and retirement, income security, health services, living arrangements, opportunity for meaningful activity and social participation, and the status of older people in the individual family unit and in our society as a whole...

...Their chances of remarriage, never too good, are growing steadily slimmer as the male deficit increases...

...President Kennedy's proposal for the financing of medical care for the aged through the Social Security system remains securely bottled-up in the House Ways and Means Committee...

...The childhood killers rampant at that time carried off the other six before they had a chance to grow through adolescence...

...By 1970, according to conservative government estimates, the sixty-five-andolder group will have increased to about 20,000,000...

...Grandpa and Grandma usually were assets in the family...