Letters to live by
I read the other day that the average lifespan of an American male is 73.5 years. Swell. Thirty-three days from now, if my luck holds out, I’ll turn 73 and a half. As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem I studied in high school that reflects Prufrock’s reluctant acceptance of becoming elderly, “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.” (Living in southwest Florida, I rarely wear trousers, I basically live in shorts. But you get the idea.)
Like many advertising/promotion professionals, I spent much of my career encouraging people to buy products and services they didn’t need, things that, rather than making them happy, actually made their lives more difficult — cigarettes, beer, sugary soft drinks, wine, cigars, fast food, hard liquor, credit cards and high-interest loans from finance companies. If you’re expecting a mea culpa you’re not getting one. If I hadn’t taken my clients’ money, someone else would have and I was, if I say so myself, damned good at what I did. (There was one category I refused to consider. When presented with the opportunity to add a firearms manufacturer to my client roster, I said “no.” I did, however, write ads for Avis to run in the NRA’s member magazine. The client laughingly rejected one I wrote as a joke headlined, “Savings that will blow you away.”)
I can hear you now: “What is your point, old man?” Good question. Let me get to it. (You know how old men are, we ramble on and on.)
This morning I inscribed and sent a copy of my humor book, Retired & Moved to Florida, to my friends Dave and Carolyn. Waiting in line at the post office to mail it, I was, as I always am whenever I go to the P.O., thinking about a campaign the three of us collaborated on that actually did make people happy — the “Healthy Aging® Letter-writing Contest,” we created for the U.S. Postal Service in 1996.
My wife and I met Dave and Carolyn through our children, and became fast friends. He was a cyclist who had competed in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics. He owned a marketing company that staged cycling events for corporate sponsors nationwide. She was a film-maker who had just written and directed a documentary entitled Our Nation’s Health … Healthy Aging. Produced by CWI Productions, Inc., the program was developed as part of a public/private partnership with support from the U.S. Department on Aging, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and CNA Insurance, and aired on public television around the time the first baby boomers were turning 50. It was the genesis of a national initiative to focus attention on the positive aspects of growing older. Dispelling the myths of aging became a passion for Carolyn, which evolved in a website, healthyaging.net, books, more television specials, and Healthy Aging® Magazine. (Check it out at healthyaging.net.)
As a cyclist and marketing professional, Dave was an advisor to the U.S. Postal Service which, in 1996, was sponsoring a cycling team that competed in races worldwide, wearing its logo on their jerseys. As the internet began to evolve, the Postal Service saw its revenues decline precipitously as people discovered email.
Dave and Carolyn came up with an idea that married their professional interests — a contest sponsored by the Postal Service inviting older Americans to share, in a letter to future generations, the single most important thing they had learned about aging. They hired my agency to create the buzz, promotional materials, and to structure and judge the contest.
Dave, Carolyn and I were in our forties, so we decided the contest would be limited to people age 50 and older which, of course, excluded vibrant young professionals like us. Five winners would be selected from every state, and one would be flown to a gala dinner at the U.S. Postal Service Museum in D.C. Each winner’s letter would also be featured in a coffee table book, Healthy Aging®: Inspirational Letters from Americans, we would edit and publish.
The Postal Service thought it was a great idea — and an effective way to remind Americans of the enduring value of a letter which, unlike an email that is deleted or lost in cyberspace after it is read, is something tangible that can be read for generations.
Willard Scott, the personable Today Show weatherman known for announcing the 100th birthdays of viewers, agreed to serve as contest spokesman. Life-size cut-outs of Willard were produced for the lobbies of post offices, along with posters and contest entry forms. A professional judging organization was hired to accept and screen the entries and, once the contest was over, to send us the ones they deemed best from which we could choose the ultimate winners.
A few weeks into the contest, curious about the nature of the entries, I asked the judging organization to grab a random handful and send them to me.
I presumed most entrants would be sharing tips about the physical aspects of growing older. My preconception, I quickly discovered once I read the sample entries, was off-base. The majority wrote about something my forty-something career-obsessed, self-absorbed self couldn’t have foreseen. I was so taken with the responses, I asked the judging company to send me all the entries, so I could review them and give each writer the thought and respect he or she deserved rather than a cursory look.
I turned 45 in the middle of the contest and my wife gave me a four-day trip to a city I had long wanted to visit, St. Petersburg, Russia. (Fun fact: I earned more college credits in Russian studies than I did in my major, journalism.) I took a duffel bag stuffed with as many entries as I could cram into it. I read them on planes, in my hotel room at night, and at the table where I dined alone on my birthday during a blizzard. I am glad I did, because the lessons I learned in those letters shaped the life I’m living today.
Here’s what I wrote in the introduction to the coffee-table book containing the five winning letters from each state:
“As members of the fitness-obsessed baby boomer generation ourselves, Dave, Carolyn, and I had some preconceived notions about the nature of the advice we would receive, particularly since the assignment was to draw upon personal experience to inspire future generations to improve their physical, mental, or social health.
Frankly, we had expected a substantial percentage of entrants would share tips for fat-free diets or their own personal exercise regimens.
We were wrong.
Overwhelmingly, the vast majority wrote not about physical fitness, but about the importance of mental fitness. Specifically, they wrote about the importance of maintaining positive outlooks and finding strength within themselves to meet life’s challenges, including aging, head-on.
So if you’re one of those millions of baby boomers who are convinced that a firm, trim body is the single most important thing you need to age healthily, there’s a key lesson to be learned from reading this book.
Sure, the hours you spend at the gym, and the effort you make to eat right, will help. Ultimately, however, it’s a positive mental attitude that will see you, and us, through our golden years. Based on the responses we received, an active body isn’t as important as an active mind, or positive attitude.”
Many entrants mentioned the same basic themes. Their most common tips for healthy aging were to:
Travel and see the world to expand your mind.
Watch game shows.
Laugh loud and often. (I know a great book you can order.)
Eat your fruits and veggies.
Volunteer.
Choose your parents wisely (e.g be born into a family whose members live a long time).
Seek inspiration. Hundreds of entrants included quotes from poems, books or famous people that shaped their own philosophies on aging.
Keep the faith — believe in a higher power. Interestingly, the older the writer, the less likely he or she was to mention faith.
Love your country, be grateful you live in America.
Walk, walk, walk — as much as you can. Walking was the #1 most-cited physical activity.
Compete in sports. Many entries were received from participants in the Senior Olympics program.
Enter senior beauty pageants. (This was the 1990s. I don’t think beauty pageants are a thing any more.)
If you’re a man, get married. Many men equated their happiness to the loving care and companionship of their wives. (Women, however, didn’t mention their husbands.)
Be thrifty. Save money from every paycheck and set it aside.
The book’s introduction concluded, Lastly, we were impressed by the ability of entrants to express themselves in writing. Generally, the quality of writing — handwriting, spelling, sentence structure — was superb. Is the ability to express oneself in writing something that comes with age? Or is it true that younger Americans aren’t taught to write as their elders were? (Note: Today's young people don’t have to learn to write at all, thanks to AI.)
At the gala dinner, I sought out 87-year-old Florence Woods from New Hampshire to tell her that her letter, in my opinion, was the best of the thousands I had read. Not only was the advice inspiring, her writing was beautiful, almost poetic. Here it is:
Dear Class of 2000 A.D.:
A cistern is a tank that gets its water from a never-failing spring up on a hillside. The water is piped into the cistern and can leave by an overflow pipe, so it is always cold, clean and clear.
You can take a dipper to drink from the cistern whenever you are thirsty.
My recipe for Healthy Aging is simple:
Drink from your own cistern.
This is, of course, a metaphor, but metaphors are true. You do have such a wellspring deep within yourself. Once you find it, and you can, you can take your dipper and drink. If you do this freely and often, you will find your own true bent and the path you must follow. You will begin to love the person you were meant to be, you will love other persons, and you will find joy and humor in life itself, come what may. For the spring up on the hillside is never-failing. Its waters are health to your own being.
Bon Voyage!
Florence Byrd Woods
New Hampshire
I have thought about Florence’s letter often over the years and drawn inspiration from it. So this morning, after returning from the post office, I went online to see if I could find her obituary. She was, after all, 87 when she wrote it nearly thirty years ago.
Her obit said that, among her other accomplishments, “Her letter to the ‘Class of 2000 AD’ made her the New Hampshire winner in the Healthy Aging Letter-writing Contest sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service and Educational Television Network.”
Florence Byrd Woods died on December 27, 2012.
She was 103.
