One-fourth of my high school graduating class has died. My sister gave me this sobering piece of information during a recent visit to see my 92-year-old mother. Certainly the 229 members of the Class of ’53 are well beyond the threescore and ten which some scripture says is the term of human life. But that was then. Today, seventy-somethings are doing what forty-somethings did a generation ago.
A fourth of 229 dead seems a high number, and it spurred my curiosity about long lives. According to the Minnesota State Retirement System calculator, the current life expectancy for the class of 1953 should be 85.9 years for men and 87.7 years for women.
The factors contributing to a long life (according to Minnesota, which I want to think is conservative in its perceptions) may surprise you. We all know about exercise and veggies. But did you know that living alone is as perilous as smoking? The Minnesota calculator adds five years for living with a friend or spouse, and subtracts a year for every year you have lived alone since the age of 25.
Did you know that a college degree adds a year to your life, and a graduate degree adds two? That sleeping more than 10 hours a night takes four years off your life expectancy? That if you are aggressive and easily angered, it is worth three years of your life?
Why fifty members of the Class of ’53 have died at least ten years before the national average might bear some investigation. Our high school was Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the home of the Manhattan project and the atomic bomb. We used to have occasional A-bomb drills at school. At one point, my friends and I began drinking lots of hot tea because we had been told that tannin could counteract radiation sickness. One boy built a Geiger counter in a metal lunchbox and brought it to school. It would click when he pointed it toward something radioactive like a watch dial.
One of the plants vented something into the air which combined with rain to make an acid which ate holes in the workers’ cars parked near the workplace. My father thought this was funny, and the plant paid to have the cars repainted. We joked rather fearfully about our fathers being radioactive and glowing in the dark.
Since those days, I know there has been an ongoing cleanup of the town which now sometimes calls itself Historic Oak Ridge. During hunting season, the story goes, quarry deer have been scanned with a Geiger counter, and if they were too radioactive, they would be confiscated and the hunter would get a permit to shoot another deer. Compensation has been paid to the families of some of those daddies who may or may not have glowed in the dark. Since I don’t live in Oak Ridge any more, I do not know what steps have been taken to solve the problems the unsuccessful storage of nuclear waste may have caused, only that it has been a concern which was addressed with lots of skill and money.
My father did not know that he was working on the Manhattan project. He thought he was involved in cancer research, which would have been a good thing since my little brother had died of leukemia. We learned about the atomic bomb when the newspapers announced the story of Hiroshima. A newsboy selling extras stood in Town Square and called “Read all about it: Japan Hit By Automatic Bomb”.
When a few years ago a nearby elementary school set about folding a thousand paper cranes to send to Hiroshima, I joined the project, folding origami cranes while I gave piano lessons.
The city of Hiroshima has sent a peace bell to Oak Ridge. I believe that bell is rung every August in somber remembrance of the bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Oak Ridge was a wonderful place to grow up. It was a small town, 30,000 or fewer, with a celebrated school system and a public recreation hall with a grand piano where we gave our piano recitals and watched foreign films. Oak Ridge had a local orchestra, a community theater and children’s theater, a daily newspaper which sponsored me for a college scholarship in journalism. There were lots of churches and a synagogue.
I just hope the surviving members of the Class of ’53 find somebody to love, finish that college degree, mellow out and don’t sleep too much. I would like to think they would live long and prosper.
2 comments:
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have "Peace Museums," dedicated to peace and non-nuclear proliferation. I wasn't in Nagasaki long enough to visit the one there, but have been to the museum in Hiroshima twice. Once I met a scientist from Oak Ridge National Labs who was visiting there. I've had Japanese citizens tell me that the dropping of the bombs ended a terrible war that might have gone on and on otherwise. On the flip side, one of my friends who had visited the Hiroshima museum was joined that night at dinner by a Japanese man who had asked if he might join my friend and his roommate. This man apparently went on and on about the memorial and what it meant, until my friend's roommate had his fill and commented, "You know, we have a memorial like that in the States too." The man, somewhat surprised, asked what it was. The response? "The U.S.S. Arizona." End of conversation.
I'm not sure longevity is a simple as the Minnesota State Retirement System calculator suggests. The people I know who have lived long lives - into their 90s and above - all deviate from at least 2 of these statistical observations. The person in my family who lived the longest, my Aunt Rose, lived alone all of her life, and never went beyond a high school education (she died at 98, still had all her marbles, as they say). Her 6 other siblings - all of whom were married for most of their lives - died in their 60s & 70s, mostly from cancer. The woman who helped raise Michael, "Mummie Chin" is still alive & well at 104. She once mentioned not finishing high school. For at least the past years, she sleeps a LOT, and has lived alone for the past 50 years until recently. She now lives in a nursing home. Mike's grandfather lived to 101, and would have lived longer if he hadn't been hit by a streetcar! He lived alone more years than not, just as Michael's many uncles & aunts, who are in their late 80s do. However, they DO have a great social support system, get together frequently, so perhaps this makes up for it.
My brother died at 48 of cancer (I also lost a sister at 16 to a car accident, so that is not relevant to this blog), and the only thing we can ascribe that to is heredity - so many of my family have died from some form of cancer. Either that, or environmental causes, such as the radiation exposure that you mention.
Michael & I graduated from high school in 1970. Of our class, a large number are no longer with us. Some of my friends died from drug overdoses, the Vietnam war, others in accidents (like my sister who was just 11 mo younger than I), some from A.I.D.S., and more recently, too many to count - from cancer and other disease-related issues. Environment? Very possibly in the latter cases. Seems every week there is another loss - and we are "just" in our late 50s. Between Michael and I, our high school graduating classes numbered 732, so 1/4 of that is 183 persons who would no longer be with us. Maybe, with all of the losses, it seems that we have reached that amount. But another way to view all of this is that 3/4 of your classmates are STILL ALIVE. How's that for the glass being have full?
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