Aging: The Discovery of Place and Purpose; Lowell Holmes

Aging, the discovery of place and purpose. I'm Byron Kalos. When you go to live in that area and observe that way of life, you find that it is in sharp contrast to what we have in the United States. The chairman of the Wichita State University Anthropology Department, Lowell Holmes, talking about how the elderly are treated in Samoa. His visit to the Pacific Ocean Islands in 1976 was the basis for his book Other Cultures Elder Years. The elderly in that part of the world are respected merely for the fact that they are old. They don't have to have achieved anything in particular. It increases as the years increase, but still there is not a great deal of emphasis on years. For example, if you were to ask Samoa when does old age begin at what age they would

have great difficulty in explaining that, because they don't really use a chronological designation. In other words, old age does not necessarily start at 50 or 60 or 65. Old age to them is a functional concept, that is, old age is a time when people cease to be productive members of the society. You might say when they no longer can cut the mustard. However, in this society, people can continue to be productive much longer than in our own society, because there are what is known as old people's work, that is, as people grow older, society provides them with valuable kinds of things, which are considered to be appropriate for elderly people. They are not forced to retire, but merely the kinds of activities that they engage in changes.

These are things that are honored. They're not things like doing domestic work or babysitting. There are various kinds of jobs which are held out by the society as appropriate and designed for old people to carry on. There's no absolute cutoff point saying, hey, suddenly you're old, it's sort of a continuum. You assume a new function in life at a certain point based on what society says. Now they do have a term, which means old man or old woman, but still it's a very, very gradual kind of thing. Margaret made many years ago, said it was very easy to come of age in Samoa, and I might add that it's also very easy to grow old in Samoa. People as they grow older continue to respect people. For example, people believe that old people should get the best of attention, the best food. In many cases, a younger person will be permanently assigned to an older person to take care

of every single need and of the total family, and there they operate in terms of very large extended families. Often they'll be 15, 20 people living together in one household. Absolutely the most highly respected individuals would be the older people. In that part of the world, nobody talks about growing old as a problem. The way we do in this country, it is not, there's no negative aspect to it. It's a very positive sort of thing. People actually look forward to growing old. Some years ago, there was a survey done in the United States, and they asked old people, what is the major problem? The number one problem for old people in the United States was loneliness. You never have loneliness in Samoa. When you're an old person surrounded by some 15, maybe 20 people who are doting upon you, it's pretty hard to be lonely.

Dr. Apologist Lowell Holmes of Wichita State University on Aging, the Discovery of Place and Purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities and the High Plains Humanities Council, produced at the Pierceville Kansas Studios of K-A-N-Z-F-M. K-A-N-Z is solely responsible for its content. Aging, the Discovery of Place and Purpose, I'm Byron Kalos. As far as we could determine, even though there were changes, there had not been a lot

of dramatic change for the old people in that society. Wichita State University Professor Ellen Holmes, talking about how modernization has affected the treatment of the elderly in Samoa. She and her husband, WSU Professor Lowell Holmes, visited American Samoa and the other Samoan Islands in 1976. In some of the more remote areas, like in an outlying island where transportation was more infrequent, you could get there on a boat once a week. It was a much smaller population. There had been enough migration away to the main island or to Hawaii that you would occasionally see old people doing some of the jobs that younger people might have been expected to do at one time.

We also noticed that there was a tendency for young people who had been away in military service or who had increased education. Sometimes were favored for certain kinds of jobs or authoritative jobs that once would have been the sole prerogative of older people, but at the same time there was still a very general feeling that families were still supposed to take care of older people and as best we could determine they were still doing that. We even did a study of Samoan migrants that had come to the San Francisco area and these people, although they were engaged, the young people were engaged in the same kinds of jobs that all of us might have. There were policemen and some of them worked at the airport and some of the women were involved in nursing and yet they maintained this value system which conferred great respect on old people.

Even though they had moved into a different area, their roots, their cultural roots meant that they tended to continue to behave in much the same way toward old people that they had in the more traditional setting. One of the interesting things that I found was that high school students still had these traditional ideas about what it was like to be an old person. These were fairly positive ideas. They knew a lot more, say, realistically about what it was like to be an old person than I think a lot of young people in our own society seem to know. Even though these young people have grown up in a society where they watch television, American television, they see the same kinds of shows that our kids do here, they wear jeans, they wear t-shirts, they have video games that they can play. It's a very different society than their parents grew up in or then these old people did.

But they still would say being old is a good thing. The old people are the most important people in the family. When I get old, I would expect to be treated like a baby which to us sounds like a terrible thing, perhaps people resent being treated like babies. But there it means having your every need responded to by all of the younger people in the family. Yes, there have been changes and there are potential threats on the horizon if the young people keep leaving in large numbers because then who's going to be there to provide that support system. But most of the old people still think that they're in pretty good shape. Guitata State University Anthropologist Ellen and Lowell Holmes on aging the discovery of place and purpose made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities and the High Plains Humanities Council, produced at the Pierceville Kansas Studios of KeANZ

FM. KeANZ is solely responsible for its content. As we understand these other foreign cultural systems, then we can compare our culture with some own culture and by doing this, we can see that some other culture has a better system of dealing with a problem relating to the elderly than we do. Guitata State University Anthropology Department Chairman Lowell Holmes.

He and his wife and other W.S.E. Anthropologist Ellen Holmes visited Samoa in 1976. One of the major value orientations in our society is self-reliance. When I look at our culture and compare it with pre-industrial or non-western or third-world cultures, I see that there is a major difference. It is that we deal in self-reliance, whereas many of these other cultures deal in kin reliance. That is, if a problem develops in our society, we try to solve it ourselves. If a problem develops in some other society, the family takes over and solves this problem, and what can be dealt with, in many cases, by a family and other societies will be something that we have to deal with ourselves or some government agency as to deal with. Now, we talk a great deal that we want independence, we want freedom, and that's good. Up to a certain point, and that is when you become elderly and you cannot fend for yourself

anymore, then you just don't have the huge support system, this family, that can help you. And then also our value system maintains that it's just not quite right to depend on someone else, and we all feel embarrassed. People say, well, I don't want to be a burden. I want to be on my own, I don't want to move in with my children. Well many other societies see no stigma to that, and as a matter of fact, it's a good thing, and old people look forward to being dependent, and they've established a reciprocal relationship that is very well understood by everyone. Old people take care of children, and then when the children grow up, they take care of the old people, and it's something that is expected, it's natural. But in our own society, old people fend for themselves, just like everybody else, except old people don't necessarily have the resources that young people do, and so it puts them at somewhat of a hardship.

What does that do for the old person today who is faced with that? They want to be independent, but they can't be independent, they don't have the resources. It sounds like a very hopeless situation, isn't that bad? There was some research done in California about 10 or 12 years ago, which focused on that precise kind of thing, and they looked at older people who were functioning quite adequately in a community setting, in spite of the fact that some of them had physical problems as opposed to people who, after they got to be old, had such difficulty that they were hospitalized for mental illness, some of them, you know, suicide attempts, or things of this type, and so they looked at what explains why some people, when they get older, have a lot of difficulty, and other people are able to go on quite happily functioning, even

though things do happen to them that they're not exactly the same people they were. And one of the interesting things they found was that people who buy into the American value system so strongly, who cannot let go of this notion that they have got to stand on their own two feet and be independent, that it's bad to be dependent on anybody or anything, people who continue to try to do that beyond the point that it makes sense are the people who have a great deal of difficulty. People who couldn't accept the fact that they were getting older, and that being old was okay. See that was the real clincher, because there are a lot of places, as we've said some on, for example, where being old is neat, but here there's always this nagging doubt somewhere that being old is not too great, because you grow up with certain ideas. You grow up being told, going to grow up and stand on your own two feet and do what you

want to do, that we're all responsible for ourselves, but we can't always be that. Wichita State University Anthropologist Ellen and Lowell Holmes, on aging, the discovery of place and purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities and the High Plains Humanities Council, produced at the Pierceville Kansas Studios of K-A-N-Z-F-M. K-A-N-Z is solely responsible for its content. Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, I'm Byron K-Los. It's a youth-oriented society, it's a future-oriented society, and old people of course have very

little future, and therefore there's a very little respect. Wichita State University Anthropology Department Chairman Lowell Holmes, he visited Samoa in 1976 and in 1984, wrote and had published a book based on his research there, Other Cultures Elder Years. We put all of our emphasis on the youth and there to be the future leaders, and old people therefore are not valued because their activities were in the past, not in the future. Also we have a kind of a throw away society, we don't take things and fix them and keep them. You have some antique furniture that some people enjoy collecting, but we don't have antique people that we place any great value on, and where there's just a kind of a general chucking off of older people, there's an idea that the old people have to step aside

because the young people come along because anything is worth doing, we're so competitive in this society that it has to be openly competed for, and old people don't necessarily have the resources to compete the way the young people do. As we progress toward 1990s and so on and so forth, we expect to see a population graph that's weighted in the elder years, and so it seems to me like as a society we're going to have to start adopting some sort of values that include the elderly population, and as they were saying before, if we look at other cultures we can perhaps find some things in it that we might be able to apply to our own. Well, some of these things are being changed right now. For example, the President Administration is talking about cutting the budget. The one thing that is absolutely taboo is social security.

Now part of this is the fact that elderly people have become a major voting block in this society through sheer numbers. They will control a great deal of legislation, and I think in the future this will develop. Also there are other kinds of organizations, AARP, I think has over two million members. Now, this represents a major interest group, and so I think in the future old people will be altering their future at the same time. But on the other hand, I think they're going to have to be some basic value changes in attitude. I think it would be nice if old people would start taking pride in being old. After all, these people have lived a long time. They've experienced a great deal. They have a lot that they can tell us. But part of the problem is that our society is changing so rapidly that there is a kind of a tendency to feel, well, these old people, their knowledge was of a different era. They're old fogies.

They're out of date. And yet there's a great deal about personal living and surviving of my father died. It was almost nine years old. Now think of the cultural change that he had adjusted to. When he was born, there were no automobiles. Or certainly there weren't very many, he had seen the coming of the aeroplane. He had seen the coming of the atomic age. He had seen people land on the moon. All of this changed he had adjusted to. And he was a living example or a living indication that we can survive. And old people have a lot to tell us. And if we could only change our attitude to realize that old people are not strange in crotchety and all of this, but they are people who can contribute greatly to our society. I think we'll all be better off. Wichita State University anthropologist Lowell Holmes on aging, the discovery of place and purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities and the High

Plains Humanities Council, produced at the Pierceville Kansas Studios of KENZ FM. KENZ is all responsible for its content. Aging, the discovery of place and purpose. I'm Byron K. Lowe's. It's a natural part of life because we know if we live we're going to age, that's just to give it. But we have to plan for it because we plan the rest of it. Kansas State University professor and extension specialist Zoe Slingman.

One of the hazards I think that many of us recognize is the fact that our own identity and in the role that we play in the workplace are as apparent, and I'm speaking to women on particularly, if we have felt of ourselves, felt that we are primarily only wife, our only mother, then when that role changes, sometimes we have an identity crisis. We need to consider that we were a person before we accepted some of these work roles are the roles of wife, our mother, our husband, our banker or lawyer or whatever, and we continue to be a person throughout the rest of our lives. So it's just a change, just a change in a pattern, but it's all part of a whole thing. What kind of dangers, I suppose, could come from taking working employment, the role as a mother or wife, what kind of dangers come from taking that so seriously that you ignore

the other parts of a life? Well, you know, this varies for each individual and many of us seem to apply ourselves whole heartedly to whatever role we're playing at that time, and sometimes it seems almost necessary. But it's important for us to remember that we have a place as a human being, that we are who we are, and that we have to develop. Someone said once, oh, you've heard the triton statement, I'm not getting older, I'm getting better. Well, I heard a variation of that. I'm not growing older, I'm just growing, and I think that that's kind of a good thing to recognize that surely we are growing older, but we can continue to grow as individuals all the way along. Then that should make the transition a little bit easier, because whenever we retire, some people at 55, 60, 65, 70, whatever it is, we know that the majority of people are

pretty healthy today, if they take care of themselves, that our life expectancy is growing and increasing tremendously. So we need to consider what we will be in those years that then belong to us, primarily just to us. As a parent, I'm speaking now, I wanted my children to grow up and be self-sufficient individuals. Yes, when they left home, I cried. Yes, when they went to kindergarten the first day, I cried, because it was a closing of a chapter, but there was another chapter there. Now I'm a grandmother and I'm loving it, because here's another chapter that I can experience. We cannot avoid change, but we can prepare for some of the change that happens to us. We can recognize that life is not static, and as good as it is, we know that I would not have wanted to be 29 all my life.

This is true. That's not a growing situation, because I've had so many experiences that have added to my joy of life since then. I've found a quote that I'd like to share, people rarely succeed at anything they do not enjoy. Well, if we want to apply that to our life role, and I'm talking now about our life role, not just work role, then if we don't enjoy living, then it's going to be hard for us to succeed at it. So I think a positive attitude is one way we can approach change, recognize, we need to recognize that it's a factor, and we need to approach it as positively as we can, and go on from there. Kansas State University Professor Zos Linkman on Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities and the High Plains Humanities Council, produced at the Pierceville Kansas Studios of K-A-N-Z FM. K-A-N-Z is solely responsible for its content. Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, I'm Byron Kalos.

The aging have been stereotyped. That when we think of a grandparent, we oftentimes think of someone in a rocking chair. Well, I know a lot of vigorous grandmothers and grandfathers who like to rock, yes, but they spend some time peddling bicycles and swimming and all of the other things. So there has been, I think society has put kind of a label on us, but we're beginning to change it. Kansas State University Professor and Extension Specialist Zos Linkman. People are beginning to say yes, this is my age, and so what? You know, so what? So I'm 50. Yes, there are changes, and yes, there will be some directions that we will have to consider and some that we will not be able to take, but we could not take some directions when we were younger for various reasons, too. How do we plan for retirement, as you said before, it is something that we do have to look

forward to. Just as any other stage of life, when one mentions planning for retirement, everybody always comes up with the idea of, oh, yeah, I got to make sure I've got enough money in the bank, but that isn't the only thing. But what kinds of things do you have to look forward to? Well, we cannot ignore the finances because it's important to have those, and I think that's a wise way for people to start, and one statistic I read said you should start about 30 to think about retirement, that seems a little early, but I don't think it's too early. We need to consider our health. These are givens that if we have good health practices, it's like preventive medicine all the way along, because we can enjoy life more fully today. And the future is brighter for us. We need to consider what we do with our extra hours, and we are going to have a number of extra hours if we are retired, because we'll have an eight hour day that we'll need to fill in some other matter.

What do you like? Is one hobby enough? Generally, it isn't for the majority of people. If you like to read, can you share that hobby with someone else? Can you work with a handicap? Can you work with a housebound? Can you work with children and share that joy because you need to not only take care of your own role in living, but to reach out and share that with others? One of the things that I saw recently was that the marketplace is appealing to the older person. We are seeing people pictured in some of the beauty ads with gray hair. They're talking about the over 40 shampoo. They're talking about fabulous 40 cosmetics. And that's a million-dollar industry. So when they're beginning to sell to the people who are over 40 and featuring that, you know it's becoming important to economics, and the world in is going to look at the people who are getting older, perhaps in a more positive way. One of the writers, Elizabeth Coltsworth, I would like to quote here, because she says it is my good fortune to have inherited nothing so dash in its courage, but acceptance of

what cannot be changed and a willingness to enjoy the small gifts of life, which still are so plentiful if one will look for them. And she was 83 when she wrote that. There was a gentleman that I knew a number of years ago who was in his 80s and being a history buff. I said something to him once, oh, you must miss the good old days. And he laughed and slapped his knee and he said, good old days. Did you ever chop eyes to get water out of the well? And I said, no, and he said, how about having to chop the wood to start the fire in the wintertime when it's 20 below? And I thought, my goodness, he's thinking reality here. And he went on to say that he had learned from some good things, but he didn't miss yesterday because he was living in today. Now I think that's a terrific statement. And whatever age we are, to me, I think the most important thing is the attitude we have about today and how we're going to adapt and live with it and in it. Kansas State University Professor Zoes Linkman on Aging, The Discovery of Place and Purpose,

made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities and the High Plains Humanities Council, produced at the Pierceville, Kansas Studios of K-A-N-Z-F-M. K-A-N-Z is solely responsible for its content. Aging, The Discovery of Place and Purpose, I'm Byron Kalos. One historian has written that in the 17th century, the journey from birth to death was as perilous

and uncharted as a voyage on the North Atlantic. Donna Schaefer is Hennestorian and a research associate at the University of Kansas' Gerontology Center. People of advanced age were very rare in 17th and 18th century America. The extreme limit of life was much the same as today, what Gerontology is called the Life Span, 80 or 90 years with a few centenarians. But in colonial America, very few people lived a reach-old age relative to today. It's really not so much that we've experienced medical or technological breakthroughs in 300 years that allow more of us to live to a longer age. Really what's happened is that we have been able to control infections, childhood diseases, acute diseases, so that more of us survive young childhood. 200 years ago, the population of America was much younger than today. In 1976, the median age of Americans was nearly 30 years.

By median age, I mean that half the population is older than 30 and half younger than 30. In 1790, however, the median age was barely 16. That means that one half the American population at the end of the 18th century was younger than age 16. The birth rate in colonial America was incredibly high relative to today. One historian, David Hackett Fisher, has written that the families of early America produced great swarms of children in his words. A lot died, but many were born so that the median age of the population was quite young. Let me give you an example of one Puritan, the Puritan clergyman, Cotton Mather. Mather fathered about 16 children during his lifetime and lived into his 70s. He was married three times, only his third wife, who was much younger than he survived him. One of the 16 children that he produced only two of those children outlived him. The experience for colonial parents was certainly one of seeing many of their children die.

What this means socially in terms of the life cycle is that for colonial parents, child rearing was a life-long occupation. One did not stop producing children at a certain point. For older couples today, we have something that sociologists call the Emptiness Period. That period of time after which the last child has grown up and left the home when couples have 20 or perhaps even 30 years together where they are not experiencing child rearing. Family roles and relationships were very different in early America, relative today, but certainly in colonial America, there was nothing that looked like an empty nest. These were full throughout the 17th and 18th century, and really the birth rates remained fairly high during the 19th century as well. You were saying that there are a lot of deaths at infancy, and I guess that would have put more pressure on the people that did live to adulthood and continue on to do all of the

work as long as they could. That's exactly right. Certainly throughout our history, people have continued to work. The elderly have continued to work in order to survive, really, and there has been a lot of pressure put on family members through the 17th, 18th, and 19th century to provide and to care for elderly parents who were no longer able to work. University of Kansas Research Associate and historian Donna Schaefer on aging the discovery of place and purpose made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, the High Plains Humanities Council, and the Finney County Senior Citizens Association, produced in Pierceville, Kansas at K-A-N-Z-F-M, which is solely responsible for its content. There's really no evidence that suggests that people live together perhaps any more harmoniously

in the past than they may today. Therefore, I think that in some ways we are perhaps a bit too harsh on ourselves for the way in which we treat elderly family members. Donna Schaefer is an historian and a research associate at the University of Kansas Gerontology Center. I think we often imagine a time when Americans lived harmoniously in extended family households. It's the kind of image that is conjured up for us by career and eyes, prints that show happy families advancing through the woods and going to grandmother's house and what have you. It's not to say that that's a totally false impression, but certainly I think we do tend to assume that family life was more harmonious, was happier, was better for its

members in some earlier day. Basically, historical research has demonstrated that families of the past exhibited essentially the same structure that they do today, that is to say American families have really never been extended in terms of household residents. Young couples have always moved away and established their own separate residences. Therefore, we have what we call a nuclear family pattern in residence. It's also true, however, that both past and present nuclear families still exist within a larger web or network of kin relations. One historian of Colonial America, Edmund Morgan, has written that the Puritan family was really a microcosm of Puritan society. The children were subordinate to their parents' wives to their husbands and husbands to the community of the godly. Colonial American society was characterized by a fairly elaborate set of reciprocal rights, duties, obligations of one person to another.

And certainly the commandment, honor thy father and mother, was not taken lightly in 17th and 18th century America. There's no question about the fact that the elderly commanded positions of authority and respect in colonial households. Proportionally, there weren't that many elderly people in colonial society because most people didn't survive that long. Perhaps because of the emphasis on duties and obligations that permeated colonial families and colonial society, human relations, comparatively speaking, may seem to us rather formal and rather distant and perhaps a little cold emotionally. I think that's certainly not to say that love and affection didn't exist among family members in colonial times and in the 19th century. It's just that it wasn't emphasized and important to the degree that we place emphasis on the family as a unit in which emotional nurture is supposed to take place. The elderly were more important what for their wisdom and knowledge as compared to today when they're more important emotionally as that sort of thing is that would you?

Yes, that's right. Today we have easier, more affectionate relationships with, for example, elderly parents or with grandparents. The respect and authority with which the elderly were held in colonial times meant that there was a certain distance, emotions like veneration and awe tend to create a distance between people. It's certainly not that that open hostility between generations was encouraged in the past, but affection was not necessarily encouraged either. The elderly often complained, for example, in colonial America that they had lived to become strangers in their own society and aliens in their own time. And so they were in a kind of a psychological sense, strangers in the hearts of their own posterity as one historian has written. University of Kansas Research Associate and historian Donna Shaver, on aging, the discovery

of place and purpose made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, the High Plains Humanities Council, and the Finney County Senior Citizens Association, produced in Pierceville, Kansas, at K-A-N-Z-F-M, which is solely responsible for its content. Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, I'm Byron K-Los. Nature of the work that people did, both younger people and older people, had an impact on the way in which the elderly were perceived and whether or not they were considered to be productive

and useful. Donna Shaver is an historian and a research associate at the University of Kansas Gerontology Center. In a society that is undergoing the process of urbanization and industrialization, a premium is placed on certain kinds of technical skills that are acquired as the society modernizes or emphasis is placed on formal education, for example, and there may be some devaluation of what we think of as traditional knowledge and wisdom and the like. And certainly, the elderly, in terms of their work roles, have been disproportionately involved in agrarian pursuits throughout 17th, 18th, and 19th century America as well. And early on in the colonial society, certainly, the land ownership that the elderly had was really a major source of authority for them and was really a manner in which they were

able to guarantee or try to secure survival in their later years. One historian who was looking at colonial Massachusetts has noted that there were two ways that an older person could pass a long property and land to his sons. One was through what was called a deed of gift, in other words, if you make a gift, give a parcel of land to a child during one's own lifetime, and the other way to do it was, of course, through a will. What Grevin finds is he looks at colonial America, is that there were really very few deeds of gift, and when they happened, there were some elaborate strings, what we might think of almost as blackmail that were associated with this, so that there were elaborate specifications for how the youngest son, who was usually in this case, the youngest son, was to provide for his elderly parents, even getting down to things such as how much food the older person would receive, how much clothing they could have, what household utensils they

could continue to use. And I think what this suggests, to some extent, is that elderly colonial Americans were not necessarily willing to trust their old age to feel the old devotion alone, but wanted to make certain and have it written down that they would be provided for at such time that they gave up the land. So you want my land, you do it my way. Yes, that's pretty much right, and in fact, because, as I mentioned, Americans have always left the parental home to establish their own households. We have instances in colonial Massachusetts where men sometimes, at the age of 40 years, were still not married because their fathers had not yet either given them a deed of gift or died so that they could get the land and the goods that they needed in order to establish a separate household. I think, in the 19th century, that, of course, represents a colonial America, but in the 19th century, things may even have been, to some extent, more difficult for older people, because as the society became increasingly industrialized, sons could go off after all to cities

and to other places and begin work in some of the new industrial occupations. So having the land and being able to pass it on was less a source of economic and old age security for elderly people in the 19th century, particularly the latter half of the 19th century, than it was in colonial America. University of Kansas Research Associate and historian Donna Schaefer on aging, the discovery of place and purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, the High Plain Humanities Council, and the Finney County Senior Citizens Association, produced in Pierceville, Kansas at KENZ FM, which is solely responsible for its content. Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, I'm Byron Keloz.

Historians note that attitudes and perceptions about the elderly and their status in society changed during the 19th century, although they disagree about precisely when that change occurred and exactly why it happened. Donna Schaefer is an historian and a research associate at the University of Kansas' Courantology Center. In colonial America, there was much respect and honor given to older people, and they had a lot of authority, not only because of land ownership, but also positions in the church and other aspects of society. In fact, one historian has noted that the seating arrangements in colonial churches very much mirrored social status, and older people were always seated up at the front of the church, in the pubes next to the pulpit, in positions of visibility and authority. And really, older people were considered by those younger in colonial America.

They were considered to be role models, really. They were, after all, some of the few people who had survived, and so people paid attention to the way in which they live their lives, hoping to discover some formula themselves for living longer. But the emotional ties, as you said before, weren't there as much as... That's right. That's right. There was respect. There was veneration, but there was not the same kind of affection that we may think of today. One historian, David Hackett Fisher, has argued that the change in perceptions about older people, the change from honoring them and venerating them to basically denigrating them and questioning their basic usefulness, occurred at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century. And his view of this is that, as America itself was gaining its independence, so were younger members of families in the community interested in gaining their independence from the authority of the elders, that the revolutionary spirit which pervaded at the times, which said,

you know, let's cast out the old authorities and the old symbols, extended to the elderly as well. Andrew Aachenbaum, on the other hand, another historian, argues that basically attitudes toward the elderly and perceptions of older people remained fairly positive through much of the first part of the 19th century and the change in attitudes toward devaluing elderly people and their contribution and the kind of work they did came about in the second half of the 19th century. As America became increasingly urban, increasingly industrialized. In an industrializing society, value was placed on technical knowledge and technical know-how. Formal schooling, for example, not the kinds of traditional wisdom and moral virtue, etc., that the elderly had embodied in an earlier time. And therefore, what they knew, their knowledge, the kinds of work roles that they performed were no longer seen as important as the roles that were associated with industry and with

business and entrepreneurship. And therefore, the elderly came to be seen as obsolete, in fact. Their knowledge and their skills were not valued highly, even though the incidence of labor force participation was still quite high throughout the entire 19th century for older people. Older people continued to work. It's just that the kinds of work that they did was perhaps not seen as important as the kinds of work roles that were emerging in the second half of the 19th century. University of Kansas Research Associate and Historian Donna Schaefer, on aging the discovery of place and purpose made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, the High Plains Humanities Council, and the Finney County Senior Citizens Association, produced in Pierceville, Kansas at K-A-N-Z-F-M, which is solely responsible for its content. Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, I'm Byron K-Los.

You know, if you want to be a good time to be elderly, an elderly person, it's probably today. And if you want to really avoid sometime when you did not want to be an elderly person, you might certainly stay away from the second half of the 19th century. Donna Schaefer is an historian and a research associate at the University of Kansas Gerontology Center. Many more people, after all, live to be elderly than was the case in colonial America. So there are many more people around us in our daily lives who are older people and senior citizens. And we have the opportunity to see people who are still leading very active and vigorous lives, although they may not still be working, but certainly they're quite busy and doing interesting things with their time. We can expect, after all, to be healthier in our old age than we have been before.

So we don't see age today necessarily as an inevitable time of infirmity and pain and suffering as was certainly true for colonial Americans. And as a matter of fact, very notion that today, almost 80% of us can expect to live to age 70, whereas in the 17th and 18th century, only about 20 or 30% of us could expect to reach old age, means that it's difficult to devalue a minority group in society that one will eventually join if one is lucky and lives long enough, right? So there are some very good reasons today why it's probably not in our best interest to see the elderly portion of our population in decidedly negative terms. And I would also say, too, that during the past 20 years anyway, the kinds of research that's been done in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as the biological sciences, indicate that normal aging need not necessarily bring with it great infirmities and pathologies that these things are really disease states, they're not a part of the normal aging process.

I think what, again, this shows is that these studies combine to provide us really with a much more positive portrait of old age than was certainly the case in what people thought about the elderly in the second half of the 19th century. Why is it that the concept of retirement even came up? I mean, was it because the proportion of the elderly grew so much in the population that we actually had a surplus workforce, and so the only thing to do was to retire, what happened there? Well, really, there were a variety of events that were going on in the second half of the late 19th century and early 20th century, where one historian has argued that it was not until the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century that anybody thought of old age or the elderly being a social problem. It was as though there wasn't a problem. They were simply integrated into the workforce and were continuing to make the contributions that they made as workers.

In the second half of the 19th century, though, there were some changes being made in society in terms of social reform movements. Coupled, I think, with the fact that it's only toward the beginning of the 20th century that industrialization in the United States had gone far enough that there were sufficient surpluses, capital surpluses that were generated that could be, in effect, put back into certain social reform movements and certain welfare measures for people. Are we seeing today an elderly population that is given more respect, given more opportunity for a better life ahead in their final years than what we've seen in the past history? This is really perhaps one of the better times to be an older person. The problem today is, as articulated by many people, is that there are no clearly defined social roles in our society today for older people.

If a person stops working, for example, if a person no longer has an active parenting role in his or her life, as is the case for contemporary Americans who are elderly, it's difficult to know exactly how to define one's own identity. So that may be the contemporary dilemma, but certainly I think I would probably prefer to have to live with those conditions and factors then to have had to live with physical pain and with the knowledge that I would have to keep working until I could work no longer and then simply hope that there would be a family member who could provide for my care. We have Kansas Research Associate and historian Donna Schaefer on aging, the discovery of place and purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, the High Plains Humanities Council, and the Finney County Senior Citizens Association, produced in Pierceville, Kansas at K-A-N-Z-F-M, which is solely responsible for its content.

Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, I'm Byron K-Loads. The poor huff sphere is novel written by Updike when he was 25 years old about the experience of people living in what was the old poor house so-called, but he saw it as what it might be 20 years later and he attempted to predict it. Kansas State University Literature Professor Harold Snyder talking about John Updike's novel,

The Poor House Fair. The whole novel deals with the relation primarily of the people with each other and with the men who administer the institution. Mr. Caretaker himself is a man named Connor, who is only in his 30s, and who is a sort of young bureaucrat, an idealist but a bureaucrat, and he doesn't have the feeling for the people that the previous administrator, who was perhaps really as good a man for the job as young Connor, but nevertheless, Connor somehow does not please the people who are residents of the home, partly because they feel he doesn't care as much about them. So in that respect, let's say, what the novel develops is the relations of people in positions of supervision and it presents a rather detailed view of such a problem, shall we say, or

the matter of care. Did it seem like the people who were subject to the care? Were they happy, were they having, were they living out life the way they would have liked, or were they having problems with this administrator so much that they couldn't do what they wanted to do? Well, at the beginning of the book, OpTech opens it with a situation in which the administrator, because of one bit of criticism, from one single individual, has, he has instituted a new program to put name tags on the chairs, so that the men sit out in the front part of the home. And they're very upset with this, because only one person has made the complaint, but all of them are going to be regimented.

It illustrates, I think, the fact that even when the administrator is well-intentioned, he must retain a sense of commonality, of common purpose, of common feeling, and proceed to act in the light of that sort of common sense approach, because he's made some people very unhappy or very irritated. But nevertheless, in the poor-hospher, OpTech wrote this as a kind of memory book. He remembered in his youth, going to the annual fairs held at such a place. And he felt, I think, that out of that consideration for the people, when they were given something to look forward to, in the poor-hospher, for example, one of the women is very happy about the fact that she makes quilts, and she takes her quilts to the fair to sell. So we see a range of behavior, of happiness, of what causes happiness, of what brings happiness, for people who are still well.

But in any case, all the people here are, we use a jargon term, viable, but are really able to do something and perceive and relate to each other and discuss with each other. For example, in the middle of a novel, there's a fairly philosophical and religious discussion between several of the inmates, and of their idea of heaven, Conner himself enters at one point, to disagree with some of them, he has little faith himself in the immaterial, or in the spiritual. His hope is placed in the worldly and the material, and he believes that he can help make things better for people. But the old man named Hook, and Elizabeth Heinem and the blind woman, speak of the real world around them, yet they have the hope of the future, and their concern is built on and part that faith, which had in a way all their lives.

KSU Literature Professor Harold Schneider, on aging, the discovery of place and purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, the High Plains Humanities Council, and the Finney County Senior Citizens Association, produced in Pierceville, Kansas at K-A-N-Z FM, which is solely responsible for its content. Aging, the discovery of place and purpose, I'm Byron Kalos. The main subject of the story is a story of family life over several generations, as Tyler tells the story of a family that is very, in a sense, ingrown.

Kansas State University Literature Professor Harold Schneider, talking about Anne Tyler's novel, Searching for Caleb, a 90-year-old man, Daniel, and his daughter, Justine, looking for Daniel's half-brother, Caleb. By the end of Daniel's life, they find Caleb, but Daniel dies before Caleb appears, and it's Justine who must go down south, but she finds him in rural nursing home in Louisiana and brings him back. Now the nursing home, as it's presented here, is perhaps one of those places that are doing their job and are filled with people who are conscious of, in a sense, how the people must be cared for, but with little of the warmth and the sense of concern for the residents of the home, it's in a sense a larger place, I think, is also a more regimented place. I might just read some of the comments.

At night in his narrow white cot, with old men wheezing and snoring all around him, he lay flat on his back and smiled at the ceiling, and hum, broken yo-yo, till the matron came and shut him up, skipping a little. From 4 a.m. till 5 a.m., he slept, dreaming first of a cobble street, down which he ran, more agile than he had been in years. Then it feels a black-eyed Susan, then a grim machinery grinding and crumpling his hands. He woke, massaging his fingers. The ache was always worse in the early morning hours. He lay watching the darkness lift, the ceiling whiteen. This was the hour when old men gave in to Insomnia. And then a little later, at 6 o'clock, the matron came to snap on a switch. Long after she had gone, fluorescent twos were fluttering and pausing and collecting themselves to fill the room with glare. I know from my own experience, my father was in a nursing home, that is both true, and yet not, I think, reflective of the experience and care of people who really do care about the residents of the homes that they run.

It's a colder picture, even while the people there might have some feeling. I think it emphasizes, and it may make us, as we read the novel, and we concern ourselves with such questions, it may make us aware of what can happen if routine takes over. Because it emphasizes, it presents, even the little portions that I read, I think, it emphasizes the fact that much of such an experience is a matter of repetition of routine for the age of the difficulty and the danger is of forgetting the humanity and forgetting the concern. I have a letter from a student that many of us here had, and she's now working in Topeka at a home, at a manor, with old people, but she writes, now, I would call my particular

job the acid tests of a person's ability to work with the elderly. My work is demanding, the pay is not great, and the work sometimes are few and far between. It's hard to watch residents die, but it's much harder to watch them fade physically and mentally. There are days when I'm sure I've chosen the wrong field, then there are days when I need an activity that involves 30 or more people, and they leave happier than they came. Or, I counsel a resident and really make a difference, or a resident approaches me and compliments me, those days I wouldn't be anywhere else. KSU Literature Professor Harold Schneider on aging, the discovery of place and purpose, made possible in part by the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, the High Plains Humanities Council, and the Finney County Senior Citizens Association, produced in Pierceville, Kansas at KANZFM, which is solely responsible for its content.