Catching Their Second Wind

By MEGAN RUTHERFORD

You've got to love late bloomers. Knowing that Grandma Moses first picked up a paintbrush at 76 or that Ray Kroc launched the world's largest fast-food chain at 52 plants tiny seeds of hope in each of us ordinary mortals that we may one day burst into flower too. And if experts are correct, we may just have a chance. Life expectancy has increased some 30 years during the past century, and much of that time, it seems, has been added not to the end of our life but to the middle, extending the time we live as healthy, active adults--and multiplying our opportunities to realize our dreams.

The period between age 50 and 75 or 80 is so fertile for creative blossoming that it has been termed a "second middle age" by Lydia Bronte, a research fellow at Hunter College's Brookdale Center on Aging. For her book The Longevity Factor, Bronte interviewed 150 high achievers between ages 65 and 101. "By 50, people had really come into their own in terms of understanding who they were and what they wanted to do." says Bronte. "They had enough experience so they knew how to do the things they wanted to do, they had professional and friendship networks, they had raised their families, so there was this tremendous flowering of creativity, and they did astonishing things!"

What enables some people to break new ground, despite early detours and defeats? Experts don't know for sure, but they do have some clues. Rock musicians, athletes, pure mathematicians and theoretical physicists tend to bloom early, while novelists, historians, philosophers and naturalists typically peak later because they must master more information, says Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, who has studied aging and creativity for 25 years. Blooming can also be tied to "career age." Says Simonton: "If a field is well defined and doesn't require a lot of knowledge or experience, one can peak early. Those who start a career late have the same shape of career as early bloomers." But they often approach the second half of their lives with added intensity. Says Mary Furlong, founder of ThirdAge Media: "Fifty rolls onto the odometer, and they say, 'Wow! How do I want to spend my time and money?' They worry less about things and more about making a difference."

Overall, the second half of life should be viewed not as a blue-plate special but as a buffet, advises University of Akron gerontologist Harvey Sterns. "People can approach the table and make all kinds of choices." To help you work up a healthy appetite, we offer you a taste of the future, based on the experiences of folks who have already bellied up to the table.

TASTE THE WINE

As a little girl, Lisa Chu wanted to be a farmer. Instead she wound up working as a photographer's rep in New York City. She gardened in her free time, but it wasn't until she was in her mid 50s that she really began to achieve her childhood ambition. That's when she started taking classes in viticulture, cleared land she had bought on Mount Veeder in California's Napa Valley and applied for permits to start a vineyard. Now 60, Chu has just sold her second crop to Hess winery. Next year she expects to turn a profit. The little girl who wanted to be a farmer has finally grown up, and it's only fitting that the grapes that made her dream come true are late-ripening Cabernet, which, she points out, improve with time. The difficult mountainside growing conditions and rocky soil only enhance their quality. "They say grapes that struggle are like the human character," says Chu. "They're better." Her advice to other folks: "Find out all you can, then just do it. Start in a small way, and keep working up."

WATCH FOR OPEN DOORS

When Linda Bach, now 52, was 10, her father died of a heart attack, and she decided to become a doctor "to save other children from losing their father." But her ambition was thwarted when, despite her superb undergraduate record at Ohio State, where she was frequently the lone woman in her pre-med classes, she was turned down for medical school. It was 1969, and 90% of medical students were male. One physician on the O.S.U. medical-school admissions committee told her, "I'd hate to be your kid!" In fact, Bach turned out to be a wonderful mother who deeply enjoyed raising her daughter Sashi. Then, when she was 42, she met a fireman who had started medical school at age 35, and her childhood dream flickered back to life. She entered the University of Miami medical school the year Sashi graduated from high school. It was 1993, and 42% of medical students were female. Bach will graduate in June; she plans to go into private practice. Gender is no longer a barrier, and her age and experience give her an edge. "I don't get as tired being on call as the younger kids," she says. "It's nothing like staying up all night with a sick child."

ACCEPT THE CALL

As a child, Mary Fowler was deeply religious but knew women were unwelcome in the pulpit, so she settled for becoming a deacon. After working as an office manager and raising three children, Fowler "accepted the call" in her 50s. Encouraged by her male pastor, she enrolled at Howard University, where she earned a master's degree in divinity in 1997 at age 63. For the past two years, Fowler has led a congregation of 65 at Mary's Missionary Baptist Church in Washington. Her special mission: unwed mothers. Each female member of her congregation takes a mother and child under her wing, offering them food, clothing, homework help, transportation and spiritual guidance. The reward? One recent Sunday, a single mother Fowler had been counseling showed up at church with her daughter for the first time. Says Fowler: "I was so elated, I almost jumped off the pulpit!"

LEAVE A LEGACY

At age 63, Lawrence Dussault was eager to retire, he says, "[but] I wanted to make a contribution." He was mulling his inclinations--environmentalism was high on the list--when he spotted his first electric automobile, and an idea hit him like a car going 60: promote low-pollution electric vehicles. Says Dussault: "I was winding down my advertising-agency career, but I had 30 years of expertise crammed into my cranium. When I was on the agency side, it always seemed as if people on the publishing side had a cushier job. So I thought, Why don't I become a publisher?" He founded the Global Electric Auto News, later renamed Electric Vehicle News, as a modest eight-page, black-and-white newsletter and developed it into a slick 48-page, four-color monthly with a circulation of 2,500. Dussault, now 68, sold the magazine in September to his 75-year-old partner in order to launch a new journal promoting the art of personal letter writing. "Don't underestimate the potential you have to effect lasting changes in the world," he says.

TURN LEMONS INTO LEMONADE

In her study of older achievers, Lydia Bronte found that many of her subjects were people who had a propensity to confront problems by turning them to constructive advantage--people like Carolyn McCarthy, 56. After a crazed gunman killed her husband and wounded her only child in the Long Island Rail Road massacre in 1993, McCarthy took up the fight for gun control. "I was just mad," she says. "I really was mad." When her own Congressman voted to repeal a ban on assault weapons, McCarthy, a nurse, announced her candidacy for his seat. She won. In the three years since she went to Washington, she has found the learning curve steep. "They don't teach you how to be a Congressperson," she observes. The dyslexic McCarthy turned to a method she had used in nursing school. She found a mentor. Her choice was surprising: pro-gun-rights legislator John Murtha. "I would sit next to him and just question the dickens out of him," says McCarthy. "He gave me so much background. I think that's how I grew to love the House and [its] procedures." Gun control was the issue that politicized McCarthy, but now she's involved in all kinds of legislation. "I'm someone who was once at home trying to balance my little budget," she says, "and now I come here and I can talk about billions of dollars."

KNOW THYSELF

A need to spare others the pain she had suffered also spurred Kristine Abney. For the first 4 1/2 decades of her life, Abney tried desperately to conform to her family's expectations. Struggling to repress her homosexuality, she endured two failed marriages and a descent into alcoholism. Finally, at age 46, after an arrest for drunk driving and six years in Alcoholics Anonymous, she revealed her sexual orientation to her friends and family. Looking back, she describes her emergence as an open lesbian as "living in Technicolor after existing in a very gray closet for too many years." Now 52, Abney is in a long-term relationship with another woman and has founded an online information and support forum for other lesbian late bloomers www.geocities.com/~classicdykes/latebloomers.htm) "I am trying to make something good happen for all my sad years in the closet," she says.

TAKE THE TIME

For many people, retirement acts like a patron. "When you think about the history of art, patrons gave people time and resources to spend on efforts other than making ends meet," says Dr. Gene D. Cohen, author of the forthcoming The Creative Age. That may be one reason folk art tends to be dominated by late bloomers. "Most self-taught artists in America don't have advanced degrees, so they have been part of the work force all their lives," says Lee Kogan, director of New York's Folk Art Institute. "It doesn't mean their talent wasn't there earlier, but it was not something that could be attended to."

Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Thornton Dial, a grade-school dropout, says he has been "making stuff" all his life. As a child, he assembled toys out of odds and ends, and as he grew older, he continued to tinker with scraps of this and that in his spare time when he wasn't working as a carpenter, house painter, cement mixer and ironworker. But it was only in 1980, when he found himself unemployed at age 52, that he began to pour all his time and accumulated skill and experience into his creations: powerful depictions of human relationships--"pictures about the future of life and the struggle we've been through"--wrought from roots, animal carcasses, discarded wire, rope, tin, wood, carpet, plastic and house paint. Despite his compulsion to create, Dial had always been shy about his art. That changed in 1987, when collector Bill Arnett discovered Dial's work and started buying it up. Shows and commissions followed. Now Dial's art sells for tens of thousands of dollars and is shown in museums across the country. For the first time, Dial is financially comfortable. A man of few words, he acknowledges a modest pride: "It makes me feel good when somebody walks up and looks at a piece." But success has not slaked his thirst to create. "He's never short of things to say [through art]," says Kogan. "What a blessing to have ideas and not be dried up and to feel you always have something you need to be working on!"

FOLLOW YOUR INTERESTS

In his long career as an executive and later as a consultant, Jim Hamm oversaw operations in factories along the U.S.-Mexico border. He always wondered how the maquiladora workers managed to make ends meet on incomes that were a fraction of their American counterparts'. One day, while visiting friends, Hamm stumbled on a shelf of anthropology textbooks--and was hooked. At first he nourished his voracious interest with books alone. Later he began taking anthropology courses at the University of New Hampshire. Four years ago, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts. He has an advantage over his younger classmates. "Graduate students often have a problem figuring out what they want to do," says Hamm. "I had never lost my interest in the maquiladora industry, and I knew from the beginning what I wanted to study." But the gist of his dissertation has surprised even Hamm. Previous research had created a literature of oppression. Hamm's interviews with factory workers in Juarez presented a different view. "Fairly consistently," says Hamm, "they portray a picture of opportunity and hope, not despair and disillusionment. I don't want to deny the literature of oppression. I just want to open up the possibility that other stories can emerge that ought to be considered." When people ask Hamm, now 58, what he expects to do with his doctorate, he quips, "At my age, it doesn't really matter." But he acknowledges that he'd like to teach in a university so he can discuss his work with colleagues. Regardless of how his job search ends, the courage and resourcefulness of the maquiladora workers have fed Hamm's appetite to learn. Says he: "It's nice to have something to do that you really can't get enough of, so that what you'd like to do in your spare time is more."

--With reporting by Melissa August and Delphine Matthieussent/Washington, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Erik Gunn/Milwaukee and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles

With reporting by Melissa August and Delphine Matthieussent/Washington, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Erik Gunn/Milwaukee and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles