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.
