Medicine: Adding Life to Years

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When Amos Alonzo, fifth of eight children, arrived in 1862 (while Stonewall Jackson was busy at Manassas), the family was so poor that every penny counted.

From earliest childhood, Stagg recalls, "we used to give one or two cents as our church contribution." Food was plain but plentiful: home-grown vegetables dominated the table, eked out with home-fattened hogs (whose bladders "Lon" used for "pigskins" and ball tossing). Lon swam and skated, got into one-hand and three-hand baseball.

By the time he began to work his way through Orange High School, Stagg was already a zealot about exercise—he ran the mile between home and school both ways. But he insists now: "It wasn't organized athletics—most of my exercise came from hard work, and I had plenty of that." He got much of it in the form of odd jobs, for as much as 25¢ an hour (a princely sum for a boy during the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes), plus helping his father to mow and cradle hay in the summer.

During high school days Stagg read about the youths of Sparta—"particularly the boy who hid a fox in his shirt and never batted an eye when the animal bit into his vitals. That book put Spartan stuff in me." For lack of foxes, Stagg decided that he had to deny himself, to give up something that he cherished. The something was coffee. He has never tasted it since. It was at this time, too—and Stagg remembers the date: May 23, 1877 —that this son of a devout Presbyterian family formally joined the church and decided to be a minister. "I became a Christian, and that made all the difference to me." From that moment he resolved to face life on his own resources, physical and financial as well as spiritual.

Subdivided Gum. Stagg was revolted by the drunkenness that he saw among his friends' parents in West Orange. "There wasn't one of my playmates who had a show in life, because their fathers drank every week," he says. So Stagg never drank. And beyond a couple of corn silks as a kid, he has never smoked. The one chink in Stagg's Spartan do-without-it armor is candy. He has always kept sourballs or similar hard candies on his dining table, has also allowed himself the smallest of indulgences in the smallest of ways: he cuts a stick of gum into three or four smidgens, chews one minuscule fragment at a time.

Lon Stagg was 21 before he got to Phillips Exeter Academy to cram for college, lived Spartanly for a while on soda crackers while he pitched the baseball team to victory. Then he saw his first real football game (Yale 6, Princeton o). Dartmouth College offered him a baseball berth, but it had no divinity school. Yale had one, so it was to Yale that Stagg went, aged 22, with $32 to his name. He always ran from job to class to garret—largely because he had no overcoat to keep out New Haven's raw, dank cold. He kept up this habit of running wherever he was going until 1957, when, at 94, he fell and skinned his nose. Said he last week: "I may get back to it."