Thoughts on Reaching Age 80
By Hank Nuwer
I grew up in a family where my mother’s people and my father’s people died at an old age.
My father’s dad lived to 86. My mother’s dad lived to 95.
I was born on August 19, 1946.
A computer search, roughly estimates that my August 19, 1946 birth, early in the Baby Boom generation, put me in the company of perhaps 9,300 squalling, crying newborns.
So many of the new dads, like mine, were decorated veterans of World War Two. My dad and mother’s engagement lasted the entire war. As a tank driver with General Patton, he truly didn’t believe he would survive the war. He did not want to leave her with a rug rat—me.
The data suggests half of my 1946 USA birthday buddies remain to enjoy our birthday cake. (I’ll take a Cabernet or Bud Lite instead—I’m on a diet.).
That’s a nicer way of saying half of us already have kicked the old spittoon and met Our Maker.
If I threw a birthday party, and all still alive showed up, I’d need drinks, snacks and Depends for about 2,660 ladies and 2,160 guys.
If life were a hoss race, imagine this.
We all bucked out of the same starting gate. We had similar diapers but dissimilar opportunities.
I had an older father with a shining war record and two parents whose schooling ended in the eighth grade. My grandfather Nuwer said his son Henry couldn’t accept a scholarship to high school, because he had to run the family farm during the Great Depression. My mother, raised by a Polish grandfather, learned her English after her fifth birthday in elementary school.
So I went to college, but with dubious motivation. I wanted to play college baseball and enjoy a social life. Instead, I had great professors who motivated me to teach college and find my voice as a writer.
But with my 80th birthday coming up, it has spurred me to find other babies born that day. My list came up with too many to count, but here are some of the heroes and causalities.
William Jefferson Blythe Clinton III would serve as the 42nd president of the United States. I waited hours in line at an Indianapolis Barnes and Noble to get him to sign his autobiography for my alma mater’s archives, but just as I got closer, he stopped signing.
Charles F. Bolden Jr. was an astronaut with four space shuttle flights.
Amby Burfoot from Virginia won the 1968 Boston Marathon.
Hollywood’s Dawn Steel headed Columbia Pictures but died at 51.
Actor Christopher Malcom was in the movies in epics like The Empire Strikes Back and also on the London stage.
Then there were three-time NFL footballer Fred Carr, basketball star Jim Tillman, and a turkey factor worker named Willie Ernest Tillie from Orange, Texas, who survived brutal working conditions.
I searched Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com and names of my birth mates kept up from the thousands.
I did a little diving into statistics. We were nurses, mechanics, secretaries and carpenters. Many us died before our first birthday.
The list of brethren killed in Vietnam who shared my birthday is staggering. I made it to 80, and their lives ended at 18-21. So cruel, so unfair. I salute Charles John Murphey, Jr., Van Chafee, Jesse Romero Castro, Andrew Orosz, John Charles Tingley, William Wieburg, Alex Spence Jr., Donald Cook, Leroy Graffe and John Michael Christiansen—all on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington.
The odds say about one in nineteen of us octogenarians will be around on August 19, 2046.
Me, I’m still working, one of every eighteen persons in the Labor Force over 80. Although women outlive men, most of us working stiffs are male.
I never was a president, never was an astronaut, never ran a Hollywood studio.
But I lived my life best I could, have a lovely family, and am looking forward to a birthday party with my wife Gosia and a college friend of 62 years from Anchorage.
The week after I cut the cake, I plan to continue to write this column I love for the Cordova Times. I also begin a new school year at the University of Alaska with students who might just guide Alaska and even America in 2046, my 100th birthday.
So it goes. Thank you for sharing my memories.
Hank Nuwer is an adjunct professor in journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks