Medicine: Adding Life to Years

(6 of 10)

For all this, Stagg remains an active practitioner of the cult of physical fitness. He goes through a routine of bending and stretching exercises on awakening. He does pushaways, knee bends and chinning on an old fig tree in his yard, jogs around a small course that he has laid out from fig to apricot to pear-tree stump (about 100 yards at a time). He cuts his lawn with a hand mower, rakes his own leaves. His blood pressure is 135 over 90. The systolic reading is low for any man over 65; the diastolic is near the upper limit of normal—except that there are so few records of men in their 90's that normal is ill-defined. His pulse is a low 64, as it has been for years. (In highly trained athletes it tends to run below the 72 that is considered normal for the general run of sedentary humanity.) His weight, 150 Ibs. spread over a frame that now seems to have shrunk to about 5 ft. 6 in., has not changed in threescore years.

First of Everything. Across the U.S. there are scores or hundreds of men (and a few women) who "by reason of strength" have passed the fourscore mark under full productive steam, but their formulas for useful longevity differ widely in many cases from Stagg's. They are alike in that they have lived through the dizziest technological changes in man's history, and most have taken these developments in stride. To a child born 80 years ago, the transcontinental railroad, only nine years old, was a new thing. Electric power did not become publicly available until he was a year old. He was 17 before Marconi sent his first wireless signals, and he was 25 when the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

Among the wise old men who differ from Stagg on nearly all life's key issues are, aptly, two who have amassed huge fortunes from the auto industry—which, say some alarmists, is ruining the nation's health by eliminating the normal healthy exercise of walking. Appropriately, Directors Alfred P. Sloan Jr., 83, and Charles F. Kettering, 82, of General Motors, both proudly proclaim that they have never taken a lick of exercise in their lives. On level ground, the farthest they walk is from office or apartment door to car or from car to plane. Up and down, "Boss"' Kettering gets a fair amount of walking because he is too impatient to wait for elevators, walks up two floors and down three in offices and labs.

Sloan and Kettering are like Stagg in that neither has ever smoked, but not for his reason; they simply never got the habit. Boss Ket has a highball before dinner every night; Sloan toys politely with a drink in company, barely sips it. Where Stagg still lives on a fanatically sparse diet, Sloan and Kettering boast that they have no food fads, eat in moderation whatever is put before them.