That was the title of a really excellent piece in the Sunday New York Times the week that Ringo Starr celebrated turning 70 on stage at Radio City (and that gerontologist Robert Butler died) . Mercifully, the point of the article was that boomers need not aspire to rocking and rolling their way though old age — “a stereotype almost as enduring as ageism itself.”

Betty Soskin and I have been in touch, and she pointed me to this video about her life and work as an outreach specialist  and interpreter at Rosie the Riveter WWII/ Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond, CA. Her long history in the area makes her an invaluable asset, not least because, as she puts it, “I’m at an age where I know how all the stories turned out.”

As a little girl in Missouri, Penny Kyle thought that teaching was “the greatest thing.” Seventy-plus years later, nestled in the study of her 1930s Tudor house in Detroit, she adds wryly, “I didn’t know any better. Well, teaching isn’t the greatest thing. It’s low pay, and it’s very difficult work.”

“The people of early America exalted old age; their descendants have made a cult of youth.” That history, and its social consequences, is the subject of David Hackett Fischer’s terrific book, Growing Old in America. It’s always seemed a bum deal that aging Americans face a double whammy: physical decay coupled with social invisibility.