SOME EXTRAORDINARY OLDER FOLKS

During my two decades plus of Masters swimming, I have come across many remarkable, vibrant, and robust older people, men and women who are living examples of what successful aging is all about. Some are top competitors, others swim solely for fitness. Whatever their background, profession, or life-style, they share an openness to new experiences and an extraordinary zest for life. Truly the young at heart, they are the wave of the future, pioneers and role models for the rest of us.

One of these people who comes immediately to mind is Gus Langner, who at ninety-one looks at least twenty-five years younger and has the strength and endurance of a man half his age. Gus holds many Masters world records, including every freestyle record for men ninety to ninety-four, and is able to swim a mile in about thirty-six minutes. He wakes up in the morning eager to squeeze every drop of living from the day. My friend Jack Geoghegan, fifty-two, a successful lawyer and top Masters swimmer in his own right, says in admiration, “When I grow up I want to be Gus Langner.”

Then there is seventy-eight-year-old Mardie Brown, whom I told you about in Chapter 1, a great-grandma six times over, who lives on a farm in Palermo, Maine, with her husband, Don. Mardie, whose ready smile is her hallmark, has a figure most women in their thirties and forties can only dream about. Several years ago, while traveling to the World Masters Swimming Championships in Brisbane, Australia, the Browns made two stops. In Honolulu, Mardie took a few days to learn how to surf at Waikiki. Then it was on to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where they spent several days of spectacular scuba diving.

My good friend Abe Olanoff, eighty-eight, was a wrestler in high school and college. “Never lost a match,” he will tell you, “even when I wrestled in a higher weight category.” Abe spends much of his time teaching swimming and leather working to the blind and helping older people undergoing physical rehabilitation. A lifeguard for many years, he has been involved in swimming for as long as he can remember, but it wasn’t until after he retired in 1972 that he began swimming competitively. He has been at it ever since, recently setting three world records in the eighty-five to eighty-nine age-group.

Abe just “doesn’t know from limitations.” I recall a sight from 1991, which Abe himself might not remember because it was nothing unusual to him. After winning the 400-meter individual medley at the U.S. national championships, he gripped the edge of the pool and hoisted his body out of the water. No fuss, no bother, no strain. He was eighty-five years old, and he had just finished swimming’s most grueling event, one hundred meters each of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. Instead of swimming slowly to the side of the pool and climbing out on the ladder, he just boosted himself out of the water. The young soldier from a nearby military base who was serving as a backup timer in Abe’s lane was astonished; “Man,” he said, “I have trouble doing that even when I haven’t swum a race.”

I could go on and on. I know many people in their sixties and early seventies whose current activities and accomplishments would astonish most folks, but I no longer consider them old. They have been around a good many years, but they are younger, in body, mind, and spirit, than most people many decades their juniors. I would like to tell you about two extraordinary people in their nineties who credit swimming with their incredible vitality.

Martha Munzer

Silver-haired Martha Munzer is a modern Renaissance woman. At age ninety-three, she is more involved in today’s burning social issues and has more energy than most people half her age. Regarded as a pioneer and visionary by her peers and an inspiration by all who know her, Munzer is an author, dedicated educator, social crusader, liberated spirit, and plain old truth talker. She is also a lifelong swimmer who attributes her longevity and good health to her practice of swimming every day.

In 1992 she finished work on her tenth book, Friends of the Everglades: A Living History. It lays out the environmental crisis the Ever-glades faces today and recounts the story of Marjory Stoneham Douglas, who heads the organization that is trying to save this unique national treasure. One of her other books, Pockets of Hope, is about poor towns throughout the United States that have picked themselves up by their collective bootstraps and transformed themselves into vital, successful communities, often being forced to overcome deep racial prejudice to do so. Six of her other books are about environmental issues and are aimed at young readers.

I met Munzer when she was attending the seventieth reunion of her class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first woman to earn a degree in electrochemical engineering, she was one of only 20 women in a class of over 2,000. She created quite a stir at the reunion when she insisted on taking her daily swim—this one in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. “I don’t know what all the fuss was about,” she says with wide-eyed innocence. “The meetings and the parties were great, but I couldn’t miss my daily swim. I love to swim, and all I wanted was for someone to drive me out to Walden Pond.”

Munzer’s love of swimming started when she was a little girl in Far Rockaway, New York, on Long Island. She says, “In the summer I swam in the ocean almost every day. That’s when I developed my deep love of the sea.” She recalls that bathing suits were a lot different back then: “You had to be completely covered, your legs couldn’t show, you even had to wear a hat when you swam. It’s a lot better now.” She still swims religiously every day, either in the ocean or at a pool near her home in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, in Florida. “I’m no Janet Evans,” she admits, “but I do about twenty laps a day.”

Walden Pond is by no means the most unusual place Munzer has swum over the years. She enjoys recounting some of her more exotic aquatic encounters. “About ten years ago I was in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I went swimming in the Firth of Forth. The water was very cold, much colder than Walden Pond, and I was the only one in.”

But that wasn’t the coldest water she has swum in. “No”—she smiles—“that was in Ketchikan, Alaska, back in the sixties. I was working on a book then, and I was taking a boat around the southwestern part of Alaska. The boat would stop at all the little towns, and the first stop was Ketchikan. I had about an hour, so I jumped off, found a cab, and told the driver to take me to a spot where I could go for a swim. He said, ‘Lady, we don’t swim in Alaska,’ and I said, ‘I do,’ so he took me to a place on the ocean where the little Indian kids swim. The children were amazed to see me dive in, and the taxi driver thought I was out of my mind, but I had a great time.”

There is no doubt in Munzer’s mind that regular swimming has contributed to her good health and longevity. “Most people my age have trouble getting around by themselves. I’m not saying I’m as strong as I used to be, but I feel like a woman of sixty.” Her prescription: “All I can say is, keep learning, keep marveling, keep laughing—and never stop swimming.”

Tom Lane

I met Tom Lane, now one of the nation’s oldest Masters swimmers, back in 1978, when he was a lad of eighty-four. I remember how impressed I was by his positive outlook. “Every day I look in the mirror,” he told me then. “I say, ‘My goodness, that’s young Tom Lane in there.’ ” Fourteen years later I showed up at his doorstep in San Diego, tape recorder in hand, to conduct an interview. The tall, square-shouldered, white-maned gentleman was apologetic when he arrived five minutes late. “Sorry,” he said, “I was out shooting nine holes of golf.”

Lane exercises every day, and he looks it. Aside from golf (“I always walk the course, never take a cart”), he lifts weights, does calisthenics, bowls, puts the shot, tosses the javelin, and slings the discus, but his favorite form of exercise is swimming. He also continues to manage his own stock portfolio with great success and listens to music and tapes of favorite books. The fact that a bout with glaucoma in 1986 left him blind has not deterred him a bit. “It just presented a new challenge,” he says with a smile.

Today, at the age of one hundred, Lane could easily pass for a healthy man in his early seventies. The retired patent lawyer has set Masters records in the backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle in three age-groups. One of his goals was to become the first person over a century old to compete in Masters competition, but in 1993 he was preempted by two older swimmers. “I’ve always liked competition, and always liked swimming,” he told me. “My mother taught me how to do the breaststroke when I was four. I compete mostly with younger men now; there aren’t that many men in my age-group.”

But as Masters swimming has continued to grow in popularity, Lane’s earlier records have gone by the wayside. “The number of older participants increases each year,” he says, “so these young bucks are coming up and breaking my old records. But that’s fine. Records are made to be broken. Now that I’ve moved up to the one hundred and over age-group, though,” he says with a gleam in his eye, “my records may last for a spell. Not too many fellas that age are up for a good swimming race. My philosophy has always been, ’If you can’t beat ’em, outlive ’em.”

Lane is an inspiration for younger people who feel that old age is synonymous with a sedentary life-style. He says that for many people retirement is when an active life can begin, when you can throw yourself into what you really like to do. His coach, Barbara Dunbar, says that Lane is an inspiration for younger people: “It’s inspiring for them to see that at a hundred and blind, Tom Lane is strong, extremely bright, and very lucid. It’s good for them to see older people in great shape having a good time.”