You’ve hit your 70s. What a milestone. What a triumph of time.
It must be remarkable to look back over seven decades of life crammed with so much history, so many experiences.
But then to reach the 70s in this day and age is expected. Being 70, 75 or 79 is not so extraordinary anymore. There are now more than 9.5 million women in their 70s and the number is rising daily.
Here’s something to ponder: The oldest of you was born in 1924, the year Calvin Coolidge was president, and the year Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming was elected the first female governor of a U.S. state. The youngest of you was born the year Frances Perkins became Secretary of Labor, the first female Cabinet member in the U.S. That was 1933.
Indeed, you have witnessed dramatic social and political changes, and yet through the rigor and routine of your daily lives you have forged a legacy, left your mark. And you are still at it.
You are choosing not to retire and still work at meaningful jobs. Volunteering becomes you as you invest your time and energy into worthwhile causes. You inspire your children and grandchildren through the example of your life.
You might have lost husbands and are beginning to see your female friends become widows too. And at this age, some of you even have outlived your children, sisters and brothers.
Living independently keeps you liberated. Seeing your independence slip away makes you sad.
This aging process is not easy. But you do it. You push on through the aches and pains. You take the good days with the bad.
On those days when you look back, you see the long road behind. And yet, you dare to look forward and dream of what lies ahead.
Your life.
— Cassandra West
CARRIE COLTON / AGE: 74 / CHICAGO
She made her life her own
The first time I saw Carrie Colton we were sitting in a crowded beauty shop.
Known as “Miss Carrie,” she stood out because she wasn’t in any of the swirling conversations.
It was easy to see why.
The smiling gaze of this 74-year-old woman whose face was as smooth as silk was locked onto something far away. When I caught her eye, I asked her: “Where have you been, Miss Carrie?”
Her smiling dark eyes crinkled with curiosity about the question. She laughed when I explained.
The next time I asked “where have you been, Miss Carrie” we sat across from each other at the dining room table in her South Side bungalow, decorated with photographs and memorabilia of her husband of 51 years, their 8 children, 50 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren, and favorite records.
She answered with another question–maybe it was a warning.
“Girl, do you really want to know?” she asked.
I did. So I got ready for the ride.
Carrie left Selma, Ala., 70 years ago. She was
4 years old. Her destination, she says, was “somewhere different from there.”
Today, she is an itty bitty, shapely woman who still has sass and class. She’s the kind of someone whose personality ignites a fire in others.
But even with the arthritis that has bowed her legs and slowed her steps, Carrie is still going full tilt, like a whirling dervish in the sacred dance of life.
“I’m successful by my standards–maybe not by anyone else’s,” Carrie says.
“No one is living my life but me. I know where I was before and I know where I am now,” she says.
Carrie’s gateway to Chicago was an older cousin who visited the family in Alabama and asked if any of the children wanted to return with her. All the children said they did, but changed their minds after getting to the train station.
Carrie’s mind was made up.
When she left Alabama, she left behind her whole family, with the exception of an older brother who joined her on the train when he realized she was determined to go.
“My mother had over 20 children in her lifetime. They didn’t all live. She had a hard way to go, but she always stayed sweet and had a smile on her face. When my mother came to Chicago to live, I was almost grown and it was like we’d never been apart. My daddy was something of a hobo who drank and went from place to place.”
“It was a hard way to live,” she says. “There were just too many of us in that one room we lived in down there.”
The young Carrie’s Chicago home was a long apartment “with more than one room.” This was where she was raised by an aunt and her grandmother and where she lived until she married.
Her childhood was not picture perfect but, she says, “I made myself happy and learned you have to make life yours.”
She stopped going to school in the 8th grade so she could work. She had a string of jobs that included being a nurse’s aide, factory worker and housekeeper.
Then, she found the job she loved most of all–crossing guard.
“My mother loved that job so much,” says Carrie’s daughter Marilyn James, now 51. “She didn’t want to leave. The children had taken to her and she had taken to them.”
Carrie became a crossing guard in 1970. She retired in 2001.
The corner of 45th Street and Evans Avenue was Carrie’s first crossing assignment and close to one of the public housing projects in which she and her husband lived while raising their family. The couple lived in housing projects until they saved to buy their home in 1970.
“That’s where all the gangs crossed,” she says. “They talked bad and cussed me. I talked as nice to them as I did to the other kids and I listened to them when they wanted to talk.
“Some of those rough ones shaped up and came back to tell me they were in college or had a good job.”
Carrie did more than talk when helping the children cross the street. She shopped secondhand shops and bought clothing for those who needed it. She bought for her family at the same stores.
Carrie not only nurtured the children that crossed her corners, but her own eight children. She has suffered the loss of one of her three daughters.
Now a widow, Carrie sorely misses her dancing and life partner–Caleb Colton Jr. They were married 51 years before he died in 1998.
Thinking of him, she crosses her legs and goes to a different place. With one leg bobbing to her music of memories and the muffled barking of her German shepherd in the basement, Carrie talks about Caleb.
“We worked together in raising our kids, sending them to Holy Angels Catholic School. And we had fun camping and going places with them,” she says. “Then we’d make our own fun dancing around here at home to records by Nat King Cole and Marvin Gaye. Even when my husband was sick in that wheelchair we still found a way to dance.”
At the mention of these good times, Carrie sways in her chair.
Her life has made an impression on her children.
“Even now, when I feel like I can’t make it,” says Marilyn, who works in a children’s clothing store, “I think about how far she’s come.”
–Pamela Sherrod
A personal parallel to history
NANCY KUROTSUCHI / AGE: 72 / ELMHURST
Nancy Kurotsuchi was born during the Depression, came of age during World War II and grew into her own during the ’60s. And now, here she is in the computer age, becoming technologically savvy.
The day before this interview, she was at a technology seminar learning about the latest in digital cameras and other high-tech devices.
Of course, when she came along, computers were still a futuristic idea and the Internet was yet to be born. But change is inevitable, so Nancy moves along with it. She seems comfortable in this computer-connected world, though she would never let you know just how much.
“I can do e-mail,” she says with modesty born of age and culture. “I think the computer really . . . it’s the biggest time waster you can ever have. I mean you could sit there for hours.”
Still, as much as she tries to stay current, who she is and how she lives reflects the choices she has made and the history of her life. Those factors have influenced her political beliefs and shaped her sensibilities. They also magnify the generational gap between her and her three children, who are 43, 42 and 34.
“I come off as a very flaming liberal compared to my own children,” Nancy, 72, says, sitting in her kitchen over coffee and pastries. “But they didn’t grow up in the same times as we did. I’m a child of the Depression. And because of that I’m frugal.
“I’m all the things [my children] are not. They’ve never known poverty. They’ve never known what it was like. I don’t think they’d work for $75 a month. They won’t do that for one day now,” Nancy says with a laugh that indicates she is both joking and downright serious.
She does see a positive side to having lived through tough economic times.
“I always tell [my children] I know one thing: If we’re wiped out of every cent we own, I know I will survive, but will you? . . . I think they should be saving. They’re not.”
Nancy, whose parents immigrated from Japan, was born in Norwalk, Calif., a town of “300 people and 1,000 cows,” she says. Her father was a Congregationalist minister. Her mother, Nancy says, “had very few choices . . . she would have given you–literally, cut off–her arm if it guaranteed her a college education. That’s what she wanted all her life.”
Theirs was a pleasant rural life until Dec. 8, 1941. On that day, the FBI arrived at her family’s home and declared her father a dangerous enemy alien, she recalls. He was separated from the family, and in 1942 Nancy and her mother were sent away to an internment camp in California where they stayed until 1946. Her older brother, nine years her senior, was attending college in Indiana at the time and did not get sent to the camps.
Those years Nancy does not readily talk about. “I’m the worst one to interview about the war,” she says, “because I do not remember anything negative … I was young . . . you know, it was fun and games.”
After her family was released, they settled in Chicago, to be near her brother, who by then was working. Nancy was 15 when she enrolled as a sophomore in Hyde Park High School. After graduation, she went to Milliken University in Decatur and majored in elementary education.
Nancy taught school in Decatur and Chicago until she and her husband, Roy, an obstetrician-gynecologist, had their first child. Then she became an at-home mom, shuttling her three children to music lessons and Little League games. Her husband “was working a lot . . . I was like a single mother raising three children,” she says.
The family grew and prospered. They lived in Maywood, then in 1962 moved to Elmhurst, where they still reside.
Nancy’s life was going well, but her history was always there, and one day while on a family trip, one of her daughters made her revisit the subject of internment by telling her that she must have “repressed memories about the camps.” Nancy thought about her daughter’s comment and decided there was “nothing to talk about. I mean, you got in there, you were fed, you were sheltered, you had health care. It’s not a holocaust, by any means.”
A psychiatrist whom she had met by chance during that trip told her that she has “the ability to shut the book on things and go on from there, get on with life.”
So, in her own philosophical way, she came up with this aphorism for survival: “If you dwell in the past, you can make yourself sick.”
Judging from her schedule, she has no time to be out of commission.
Declaring herself “healthy . . . with no life-threatening diseases,” Nancy is engaged in a full, active and socially diverse life.
She volunteers for Project CARE, a literacy program, and she is the voter registration chair for the League of Women Voters in DuPage County.
She indulges her twin passions for travel and theater as often as she can. Since her husband retired, they have visited almost every continent. They have “only about three more places that she wants to see: England (because her husband has never been), Germany (because “it’s a part of history”), and the South Pacific (“I want to sit and watch the sun set . . . in Bora Bora.”).
Nancy and her husband have been married 44 years this month.
They came together during a time when, Nancy once told her youngest daughter, women had only three career choices: secretary, teacher and nurse. “That was it.”
So much has changed since then. But Nancy, who doesn’t think of herself as 72–“I say I feel like I’m 38”–is not dwelling on the past.
In her quiet home, decorated with handsome and delicate Japanese prints, antiques and an impressive collection of Imari porcelain plates, she contemplates her legacy.
“I hope that when I die that I will have no regrets and maybe I’ve made a little difference.”
–Cassandra West
Happy, lucky and doing just fine
ERMA WINN WITH GOATS BRIDGET (LEFT) AND ARIEL / AGE: 77 / RICHMOND
Erma Winn, 77, has never lived outside of McHenry County. An Algonquin farm girl who grew up and wed a farmer, she has been married for 53 years to Ed Winn, whom she met when her best friend married his best friend. Erma and Ed had a country church wedding. Erma has six children, 17 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. She lives in Richmond and began raising goats about 14 years ago.
What can you say about goat people?
Well, you have to be a little bit crazy to do this. But goat people are very nice, they always help you if you get in trouble. Goat people are the nicest sort.
How many goats do you have?
We have about 60 goats on the farm, 26 are mine. I have 21 does and 5 bucks. They are Saanen and Oberhasli breed.
Do you have a favorite goat?
Bridget and her daughter Ariel are my favorites. I like Bridget because she is old and fat like me. When I show Bridget, she knows I can’t walk fast and so she lets me lead her along.
Why goats?
I like them. They’re docile. They love people. It is a non-profit hobby. It keeps me going; something to get out of bed for.
What else do you do besides the goats?
I sew, and volunteer at the church. I help with the meals after the funerals, the Christmas walk and the cookie bakes. I am a 4-H leader and work in the visual arts, specifically the clay department. I baby-sit and help the great-grandkids with their homework. I also go to Golden Girl aerobics on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I like crafts and stamping too.
You’ve lived all your life on farms, first your family’s, then the dairy farm you and your husband operated until he retired from farming. Have you been happy?
Yes. I think we’re lucky. We are fine with Social Security and the small paycheck my husband gets from his job. Ed delivers auto parts and stays busy. He loves to work. I never get bored at home.
What can you say about being in your 70s decade?
I have more aches and pains. Ed has had three bypass surgeries and Mr. Arthritis has come to visit too. I just keep moving and I am happy with what I am doing.
What are your worst memories?
Maybe they are yet to come. Last year our grandson was killed in a car accident. The car he was a passenger in didn’t make the curve and hit a tree. He died, but they donated his eyes and his heart valves.
What are your best memories?
My children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I really enjoy them and our activities in 4-H. We have enough money. I mean we aren’t rich, but we have enough and that’s all I care about. I just think we are lucky. I am happy with what we have done.
— Stacey Wescott and Marsha Peters
BY THE NUMBERS
A statistical portrait of women in their 70s
HEALTH
17.2% excellent
51.7% good
19.3% fair
11.8% poor
SATISFACTION WITH FINANCIAL SITUATION
38.7% satisfied
44% more or less satisfied
17.3% not at all satisfied
HAPPINESS OF MARRIAGE
71.7% very happy
26.9% pretty happy
1.4% not too happy
ADEQUACY of SOCIAL SECURITY
57.5% too little
40.5% about right
2.0% too much
COMPUTER USAGE
78.6% no
21.4% yes
LABOR FORCE STATUS
58.3% retired
3.2% working full time
8.9% working part time
0.5% temporarily not working
0.2% unemployed, laid off
27.2% keeping house
1.7% other
FREQUENCY OF PRAYER
51.9% several times a day
31.8% once a day
5.9% several times a week
5.6% once a week
2.4% at least once a week
2.4% never
Source: NORC (National Opinion Research Center, affiliated with University of Chicago), data from general social surveys, combined years 1998, 2000, 2002
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The series online: For stories, additional photos and a related message board, go to chicagotribune.com/decades.
