And How Will YOU Celebrate Your 100th Birthday?

It's been a long time since we've posted about a crone of the week, but I couldn't resist this one!  On Saturday Georgina Harwood of South Africa celebrated her first century of life by a parachute jump out of an airplane along with 15 members of her family who jumped with her.  But Georgina isn't quitting there.  Today (Monday) she's following up by deep sea diving in a shark cage-- to feed the sharks birthday cake?

Here's how CBS reported it:  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-africa-georgina-harwood-100th-birthday-skydive/ 

Ms. Harwood said Saturday was her third skydive.  The first one was in 2007, when she was 92.

In the photo above, she is celebrating her jump with a glass of wine.  For my 100th, in 26 years, I may skip the parachute jump and the shark cage but will definitely join in the wine-drinking.

In Greek, when you wish somebody "Happy Birthday" you automatically add, "May you reach 100."  We'll have to think of a new wish for Georgina.

Bel Kaufman Talks About Her First 100 Years

I got this e-mail yesterday from Laura DeSilva of Open Road Integrated Media and enjoyed watching the video of Bel Kaufman, at 101, discussing her early years and what convinced her to become a teacher. Thought you would find it interesting as well.  She's certainly an inspiration to all of us crones.  I suspect her optimistic outlook, despite early challenges,  was a major factor in her longevity.

 Bel Kaufman sitting on the knee of her grandfather, the famous Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem

Hi Joan,

I'm writing because I loved your "crone of the week" piece on Bel Kaufman in July, and I thought you might be interested in the news that on September 18, 2012, Open Road Integrated Media will launch the first ebook edition of Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase, bringing "the most popular novel about U.S. public schools in history" (Time) to new generations of readers.

 

One of the very special facets of this debut is our new video interview with Ms. Kaufman. At 101 years old, she exhibits the same warmth and wit that made her such an unforgettable teacher and champion of education - and she offers a bit of inspiration for today's teachers, I think. I'm so pleased to share the video with you, here: http://www.openroadmedia.com/authors/bel-kaufman.aspx. If it moves you, I hope you'll consider sharing it with your friends and readers. 

 

Kaufman is also the author of Love, etc. (1979), a powerful, haunting, and poignant novel rendering life as fiction. Open Road Media will release Love, etc. on September 18, with La Tigresse and This and That! to follow on October 30.

Bel Kaufman is 101 and Still Writing

                                                 Chester Higgins/New York Times

Yesterday I was leafing through the new August issue of Vogue magazine. It’s the “Age Issue” which annually features, as they put it in a cover line:  ” Wonder Women from 28 to 101.”

I was thrilled to find an article by Bel Kaufman who is, in fact, 101, and to learn that she’s as witty and wise and defiant of the status quo as ever. 

Long ago, when I was starting out as a “career girl” in New York, I read and loved her book “Up the Down Staircase” -- published in  1965 when Bel was in her fifties.  It was a thinly disguised saga of her experiences in defying bureaucracy when she taught high school in New York, and it spent 64 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Bel Kaufman is a granddaughter of the Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem, whose stories formed the basis of “Fiddler on the Roof”.  She went on after the success of "Staircase" to become a much-in-demand speaker who specialized in the subject of Jewish humor.  In fact last year, when the New York Times  interviewed her  about her 100^th birthday, she was teaching a course about Jewish humor at Hunter College, her alma mater.

I was overjoyed to learn yesterday that Ms. Kaufman at 101—thirty years older than I am—is still teaching and writing and sharing her wisdom with women born a century after her.  As she explained to both the Times and Vogue, she was born in Odessa, Russia, was a child in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, and her family was persecuted because they were Jews.  Food was scarce and as she said, bodies lay in the streets frozen in odd positions. “But a child has no basis for comparison.  Doesn’t every child step over dead bodies?  I didn’t know any different.”

Her family left Russia for New York when she was twelve (and she was placed in first grade because she didn’t speak English.)  Bel grew up being passionate about poetry, which she reads in Russian, English, French and German.   She got  her master’s degree in English and comparative literature at Columbia and decided she wanted to teach at the high school rather than the college level because “I felt that college students were already finished—I would be of no great influence to them.  I wanted to show high schoolers, for  whom I could still make some difference, the joy in reading and writing and learning, before the malaise of later life.”

Bel is now writing a book about her grandfather, Sholom Aleichem, inspired by a letter he wrote to her when she was a child.   Personally, I can’t wait to read it.

I hereby designate Bel Kaufman not Crone of the Week (a title I haven’t bestowed lately) but Crone of the Year—perhaps the decade.  And for those of you who don’t read Vogue, I want to quote a couple of paragraphs from her August article on the subject of teaching and of being old.

“Not too long ago, I was speaking at a retirement luncheon at the United Federation of Teachers in New York City and it was as if I was back in college, speaking to those seven-year-olds again. I told the teachers that while they may think they are retiring, they are not.  I can tell you, you are always a teacher.You remain alive in thousands of memories and thousands of minds of people you have taught, “ I said.  “It’s a kind of immortality.”…

“I’ve lived a long time, a very long time, 101 years, and I’m still here.  I’m done with the doubts and struggles and insecurities of youth.  I’m finished with loss and guilt and regret.  I’m very old, and nothing is expected of me.  Now, provided good health continues, I can do what I want.  I can write my memoirs.  I can edit my works for future eBooks.  I can even do nothing—what a luxury that is!  I have new priorities and a new appreciation of time.  I enjoy my family more than ever, and also a sunny day and a comfortable bed.  I keep up my interest in books and theater and people, and when I’m tired, I rest.  My former students write to me and visit me.  I had many problems and disasters in my life; fortunately at my age, I don’t remember what they were.  I’m glad I am 101.”

Her Tossed-Out Diary Made her an Author at 92

Angel Franco/ The New York Times

I often say that the Obituary Section of The New York Times is my favorite section because it introduces me to fascinating people I’d never have heard of, like the man who designed the New York Coffee cup or the one who invented the Frisbee.

Last week I learned the story of Florence Wolfson Howitt, who died at 96.  Hers is a story so full of coincidences that, if it were fiction, everyone would scoff.

Here’s what The New York Times obit said on March 7, 2012:  “Florence Wolfson Howitt, whose lifelong dream of recognition as a writer eluded her until she was in her 90s, when the diary she had kept as a teenager was found in a Dumpster and became the subject of a newspaper article and a widely publicized book, died on Tuesday at her home in Pompano Beach, Fla. She was 96.

Florence Wolfson, the daughter of well-to-do parents living in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was 14 when she was given a little red diary with gold-edged pages. For the next five years, without skipping a day, she wrote four-line entries that evoked her passions.

‘Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven,’ she wrote on June 28, 1932. ‘I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.’

‘Went to the Museum of Modern Art,’ she wrote on Feb. 21, 1931. ‘Sheer jealousy — I can’t even paint an apple yet — it’s heartbreaking!’

But she could write, and that was apparent at Wadleigh High, an arts school in Manhattan, from which she graduated at 15; at Hunter College, where she was editor of the literary magazine in her senior year; and at Columbia, where she earned a master’s degree in English literature in 1936. …

She wrote articles for Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, with titles like “How to Behave in Public Without an Escort” and “What to Do With the Unmarried Daughter.”

Miss Wolfson married Dr. Nathan Howitt, a dentist, in 1939. They moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive and 82nd Street. Sixty-four years later, a steamer trunk that had languished in the basement was placed in a Dumpster on the street. A worker at the building pulled the diary from the trunk and gave it to Lily Koppel, a news assistant at The New York Times, who was subletting an apartment in the building.

In July 2006, after searching birth records and locating Mrs. Howitt, Ms. Koppel wrote an article about her for The Times. That led to Ms. Koppel’s 2008 book, “The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal,” and a close friendship. Ms. Koppel, who is now a freelance writer, said in an interview that the diary “was sort of a telephone line across time, and a glimpse into a vanishing New York.”

Profiles of Mrs. Howitt appeared in publications around the country. She was a guest on the “Today” show. She gave readings and interviews at book club gatherings.

Florence Wolfson was born in Manhattan on Aug. 11, 1915, to Daniel and Rebecca Wolfson. Her father was a physician, and her mother owned a couture shop on Madison Avenue. Mrs. Howitt’s husband died in 2007…

“It was the most exciting year or two of her life, something she always sought,” Ms. Fischel said of her mother’s unexpected fame. “She felt like a celebrity and was 92 years old.”

So many unlikely things gave this woman literary fame at 92.   What if the curious apartment worker hadn’t pulled the diary out of the steamer trunk on the sidewalk?  And what if he never gave it to the young New York Times Reporter?  And what if she never researched to find out the author of the diary?  But in the end, after longing for literary recognition for nine decades, Florence Wolfson Howitt got her fifteen minutes of fame before she died.

Her story hit a sensitive spot in me—because she and I have so many things in common.  Like her, I went to Columbia for a masters degree (in journalism)  When I got married, I lived two blocks away from her building on the West Side.  Like her, I wrote dozens of articles for women’s magazines (and 22 articles for The New York Times.)   Like her, I’ve kept a diary all my life (but not one worth publishing—just a boring few lines on what I did every day.) 

I also have a habit, on my birthday, of making a list of my goals for the year—and then hiding it somewhere in my desk.  Not too long ago I found a list I made when I was fifteen years old.  The number-one goal on my list was “write a best-seller.”

Seeing that brought a rueful smile to my face.  When I was fifteen, it seemed like a reasonable goal, but now that I’m 71, I can only laugh at my naïve 15-year old ambitions.  I have written a few books in my life that were well-reviewed and are still in print, but they were ghost-written with other people’s names on them and told other people’s stories.  I have yet to see my own name on a “real” book. (I’m not counting my Greek Cats photo book as a real book.)

But instead of giving up on my habit of writing a list of goals every year, I’d better sit down and write my list for this year (my birthday was last month.)  The story of Florence Wolfson Howitt has given me hope.  After all, I’m not dead yet....

And, oh yes, I'm designating her as Crone of the Week.  The statue please...

The Body of the Year is the Crone of the Week

It’s been a long time (over a year) since I nominated a Crone of the Week, but when a 66-year-old woman is named  “Body of the Year”  over supermodels like Elle MacPherson, not to mention Jennifer Lopez and Pippa Middleton, then “A Rolling Crone” has to take notice.

The poll of 2,000 men and women was conducted by the L.A. Fitness club chain.  Helen Mirren won with 17.5 per cent of the vote.  MacPherson, 48, came in second with 10 per cent.

 It’s hard not to hate Helen Mirren for looking so good in a bathing suit.  The instinctive reaction is, “Well, she probably has a personal trainer  who comes in every day”. But the actress who has played three queens, and can look like an elderly frump as well as a hot pin-up girl, says she stays fit by exercising every day by herself with her WII.

“You can hula, jog, yoga, step – all in one session,” she told the Daily Mail of London. “You need never get bored, as every day you can tailor a new workout. It challenges you and you do it at home, so nobody need see you in those old yoga pants and torn T-shirt.”

(For fellow crones who are as technically ignorant as I am, a WII or more properly wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo in 2006.)

 Helen Mirren is a brilliant role model for all of us over-sixties.   She’s intelligent, dignified (usually) and a hugely successful career woman (Golden Globe, Oscar for  “The Queen”, a house full of other prizes).  And she has abs to die for.

I don’t imagine that any amount of exercise could get me abs like that, but Helen Mirren has inspired me to turn my single weekly Pilates session into two and –as soon as I get back from Miami, where I’m going on Friday in anticipation of welcoming my first grandchild into the world—I vow to sign up yet again with Weight Watchers to try to shed that extra ten pounds, which has somehow turned into an extra fifteen pounds. (Thinking of the heat in Miami I pulled out some shorts from years ago, tried to put them on and promptly tossed them into the pile for Goodwill.) 

Another thing I love about Helen Mirren is that she lets her wrinkles show.

Wilma Mankiller and My Grandmother

Today (Sat. April 10) thousands of people will gather at an outdoor memorial service for former Cherokee tribal Chief Wilma Mankiller,(above) who died last week at the age of 64 from pancreatic cancer. The service will be held at the Cherokee Nation Cultural Grounds in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, about 70 miles east of Tulsa.

If anyone deserves to be in the Crone Hall of Fame it’s Wilma Mankiller, who was the first woman to lead a major tribe and the most famous activist on behalf of American Indians. According to her New York Times obituary, she revitalized the Cherokee nation’s tribal government and improved its education, health and housing. She was the Cherokee chief from 1985 to 1995 and during her tenure, the nation’s membership more than doubled, to 170,00 from about 68,000

Wilma Mankiller battled lymphoma and myasthenia gravis, received a kidney transplant from an older brother and survived a head-on automobile collision in 1979 that required 17 operations and years of physical therapy.

She first became famous when Native Americans took over Alcatraz Island and occupied it for 19 months to call attention to the government’s treatment of Indians.

She had two daughters, and after her marriage ended in divorce, she returned with them to live on her grandfather’s land in Oklahoma where she was born—a tract of 160 acres known as Mankiller Flats, where she grew up. During her childhood, her family had no electricity or indoor plumbing.

As the Cherokee nation’s elected leader, Wilma was chief executive of a tribe with a budget that reached $159 million a year. She put her energy and the tribe’s income into health care, job-training and the local schools.

Now about my grandmother – her name was Anna Truan Dobson. She is the young woman in the vintage photo above in the upper row on the right. She grew up in Tennessee with French-speaking Swiss-immigrant parents who had colorful tales of the Civil War. Anna had two college degrees before the turn of the century—a rarity for a Southern woman back then. She was courted by my grandfather, Frederick Fee Dobson, a Presbyterian minister who wanted her to join him in his ministry in Indian Territory Oklahoma, where he was expected to convert the Indians to Christianity and establish churches and schools.

At first Anna Truan turned him down, but eventually she relented and joined him at Tahlequah Institute, Indian Territory, Oklahoma where she is in the photograph above (and where Wilma Mankiller was born and died.) . The information written on the back of the photo says that at the time of her marriage on Jan. 1, 1896, Anna Truan was teaching on the faculty of Tahlequah Institute. She is posing on the “porch of the dormitory” with the other faculty members—the women were her bridesmaids and the man with the mustache was Reverend Hamilton, the minister who married them. (Don’t you love the ladies’ stylish leg ‘o mutton sleeves?)

After Anna was married and began having her nine children (two boys and seven girls!) she continued to teach the Native Americans piano and French, sewing and quilting. We have inherited a large beaded pincushion that the Cherokee women gave my grandmother in appreciation. (I also have a Dresden Plate pattern quilt she made for my mother’s wedding – as she did for each child—and my grandfather, Rev. Frederick Fee Dobson, reportedly sewed one of the quilt squares himself.)

I believe my grandfather was also responsible for producing the first written dictionary of the Cherokee language, but that may just be family legend.

I always admired my grandmother for her beauty and her intellectual curiosity. After her husband died, she traveled and lectured about birds, wild flowers and biblical subjects. Just raising nine children to adulthood back in those days was a phenomenal achievement, but she also found time to keep on researching and learning until she suffered a stroke in her eighties.

Not until my children were in school studying subjects like the Trail of Tears (when Native Americans were forcibly driven from the Southeast U. S. by federal troops during the winter of 1838-39) did I start to suspect that my grandparents may also have been part of the oppression of the native Americans in Oklahoma (although I’m sure their motives were benevolent.)

Looking back with today’s perspective, knowing what we have learned from activists and educators like Wilma Mankiller, I can see that my grandparents, who undoubtedly meant well by carrying their Christian religion and western educational system to the Indian Territory, were also part of the bureaucracy that forced the Native Americans to give up their ancient culture and traditions

I know very well how badly the American Indians were treated by our government. In a future post I’m going to write about a woman called “Lost Bird of Wounded Knee”, an infant found alive under the frozen body of her dead mother four days after the massacre in December 1890. This girl was adopted by the Brigadier General who found her, and then exploited and mistreated by him and others until she died at age 29.

But that’s a story for another day. Today we remember Wilma Mankiller and also my grandmother, Anna Truan Dobson, who died in 1965 at the age of 93. I think they were both brave and resourceful women worthy of the Owl of Athena award for courageous, wise and exemplary cronehood. They both deserve the title of Crone of the Week.

Crone of the Week – Resistance Heroine, 105

I love reading the obituaries in The New York Times because I keep learning about fascinating lives of people I’ve never heard of – like the man who invented the Frisbee.

Last week I read the obituary of Andrée Peel, who died on March 5, age 105, a French-born woman who, during WWII, saved the lives of 102 Allied airmen, was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis in two concentration camps and published a memoir of her life when she was 94.

She definitely deserves the Crone of the Week award!

Here are the highlights of The New York Times obituary:

A native of Brittany, Andrée Virot was running a beauty salon in the Breton port of Brest when France fell to Germany in the spring of 1940. She joined the resistance movement and began circulating an underground newspaper.

Code named Agent Rose, she fed information to the Allies about German troop movements and bombings. She guided British planes to night time landings at secret airstrips marked by torchlight,.

She helped save 102 Allied airmen trapped behind German lines by setting up safe houses and taking the men to isolated parts of the Brest beaches where they were picked up by boats that took them to England.,

Andrée fled to Paris but was arrested by the Gestapo after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. She was imprisoned at the Ravensbruck and then Buchenwald concentration camps and was about to be executed by a firing squad when Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945.

After the war she fulfilled a vow to give thanks at the Sacre Coeur in Montmartre for her survival,.

Managing a restaurant in Paris, she met and married an English student, John Peel. They settled in Bristol and had no children. He died in 2003.

Andrée Peel was decorated by the French government and received the Medal of Freedom from the United States. During the war she received a letter of appreciation from Sir Winston Churchill. In 1999 she published her memoir “Miracles Do Happen.”

On Feb. 3, 2010 Andrée celebrated her 105th birthday at the nursing home where she lived near Bristol. Wearing her WWII decorations, she sang the French National Anthem.

I just wish I had been there to celebrate with her.

Who is the Crone of the Week?

And the award goes to…no NOT Betty White (who IS experiencing a dramatic revival at the moment) but to Florence Critelli, who works in a Long Island pharmacy and battled with a robber last week, then insisted on finishing her shift and driving herself home. Florence is 91.

Around 11 a.m. the robber entered the Rite Aid Pharmacy in East Northport and handed Florence a dollar for a candy bar. When she opened the register, he reached over and grabbed a handful of cash. The great grandmother of 13 “grabbed his hand to stop him from taking the money and I just screamed,” she told the New York Post yesterday. Then the bandit punched her in the chest, knocking her to the floor and ran out with the cash.

Florence refused medical attention when police arrived and then turned down the suggestion that she go home to recover. “I didn’t want to come home. What was I going to do but sit there and be bored?”

She finished her shift at 5:30 and insisted on driving herself home. She’s been working at the pharmacy for 17 years. She told the Post her hobbies include playing the slots at casinos and knitting and crocheting mittens that are given to the needy. She’s been married twice and has two children and seven grandchildren as well as the 13 great-grandchildren.

I think I’m going to design an award to send to the occasional Crone of the Week who personifies crone power. I think it should be a statue of an owl, since the owl was the symbol of the Greek goddess Athena and also represents wisdom.

Not that it was too smart for Florence to fight back against the robber, but it does show gumption.

I love her attitude at the age of 91 and also the afghan she has on her couch in the photo above. I bet she knitted it herself.

FIRST BLACK WOMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE -- ELIZABETH KECKLEY

(This is the first of an occasional “Crone of the Week”-- women whose stories I want to tell. I’d appreciate your suggestions of women in history who accomplished something courageous, significant or even outrageous during their cronehood years and deserve to be featured on A Rolling Crone. You can e-mail me at joanpgage@yahoo.com)

Born a slave in Virginia in 1818, Elizabeth Keckley (also spelled Keckly) became—not the first black woman to work in the White House—there were surely some employed as workers and servants before her- but she was the first black woman to have so much influence on and access to the President’s family that she became the first person ever to write a back-stairs book, revealing the inner workings of Abraham Lincoln’s domestic life. Keckley was the only person who could calm Mary Todd Lincoln when she would suffer a nervous crisis before an important event. After the inauguration, Mrs. Lincoln insisted all her gowns be made by Keckley. (One of them is pictured above.) She turned to the former slave for help and advice on domestic details and protocol for White House parties. Elizabeth traded jokes and compliments with the president, who teased his wife about her penchant for low necklines and said to Mary, when he saw the first Keckley-made gown, “I declare, you look charming in that dress. Mrs. Keckley has met with great success.” Elizabeth also served the Lincolns as a baby sitter when the boys were ill, and nursed the first lady when she was suffering one of her crippling headaches.

Elizabeth was born to a slave named Agnes, owned by Armistead and Mary Burwell in Dinwiddie, VA. “Aggy” had been taught to read (which was illegal) and she taught Elizabeth to read and to sew, and they both worked as house slaves to the Burwell children. On Aggy’s death bed she revealed to her daughter that their master, Armistead Burwell, was also Elizabeth’s father.

After Burwell died, Elizabeth was loaned to other owners who beat her, although she defied them and refused to cry out. She was eventually raped by a white man, and gave birth to her only child, George. Since Elizabeth was mixed race and her rapist was white, George was so light that he claimed he was white in order to serve in the Union Army. He was killed in action in 1861.

Through a combination of business acumen, sewing skills and intelligence, Elizabeth eventually managed to buy freedom for her son and herself, and moved to Washington D.C. where she became the most favored modiste to the likes of Mrs. Robert E. Lee. Another socialite introduced her to Mary Todd Lincoln, who had just arrived in Washington and was very insecure about the city’s fashion sophistication and social mores.

Elizabeth then became the exclusive dressmaker for the new first lady, as well as her best friend and confidant. She would dress and calm Mary before every event, fixing her hair, accessories and jewels. As she prepared the first lady, Elizabeth would chat with the president and received many compliments from him for her skills. When Lincoln was assassinated, the first person Mary Todd Lincoln called to be with her was Elizabeth Keckley.

When Mrs. Lincoln moved back to Illinois after the assassination, she insisted that Elizabeth travel with her. Keckley returned to her profitable dressmaking business in Washington, and the widow wrote her many letters. Finally, Mrs. Lincoln, convinced she was running out of money, told Keckley to meet her in New York City where, using assumed names, they tried to sell possessions and clothing of the Lincolns to raise funds. Word got out about what Mary Lincoln was doing, and she felt disgraced by the news reports. Elizabeth Keckley then wrote what was the first backstairs-at-the-White-House tell-all, called, “Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House”. In the back of the book was an appendix with 24 letters that Mrs. Lincoln had written to Elizabeth, including the statement that she considered her “my best living friend.” The book was denounced by everyone from Lincoln’s son Robert to the New York Times as “backstairs gossip” that desecrated the memory of President Lincoln, although Mrs. Keckley kept trying to explain that she only meant to defend Mrs. Lincoln.

Mary Lincoln felt betrayed and their friendship ended. Eventually, when the former first lady descended into total madness, her son had her institutionalized.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Keckley continued to earn money by sewing—although most of her white clients had abandoned her. In 1892, when she was 74, she moved to Ohio to become head of the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts at Wilberforce University, which her son had attended. She organized a dress exhibit at the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and, in her 80’s, she returned to Washington to live in the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children—which had been established in part by the Contraband Relief Association that Keckley founded during the war to help freed slaves. Until her death, Elizabeth had a photograph of Mrs. Lincoln on her wall. She died in 1907 at the age of 89 and was buried in Harmony Cemetery in Washington. She had been careful to pay far in advance for a plot and a stone, but when the graves were moved to a new cemetery, her unclaimed remains were placed in an unmarked grave.

I learned about Elizabeth Keckley when I bought, on E-Bay, a cased ambrotype portrait of a mixed-race woman. Pinned to the velvet lining was a scrap of paper with the words “Elizabeth Keckley, Formerly a Slave”. Many of my favorite crones were introduced to me through antique photographs that I’ve bought and then researched, to find out their “back story.” In my next post I’m going to show you some portraits of Keckley and ask you to be a detective and help me find out if my E-Bay image of Elizabeth is authentic.