The moment Maybelle Blair took a decision – one she didn’t know she was about to take – she says she “felt like all the blood rushed away from my head, down to my toes. I didn’t know what was happening”. Blair, the former baseball player in the postwar women’s league which inspired the 1992 film A League of Their Own, was on stage at the 2022 Tribeca film festival in New York, since she had been involved in Amazon’s TV adaptation. She looked around and wondered why she was still hiding. Although her sexuality had not been a secret among her teammates, she decided there and then to publicly come out at the age of 95.
“Out of the clear blue sky, I just blurted out ‘I want everybody to know’,” she says. “I was in the closet for 95 years. That old door blew open. I was sitting there, my eyes wide open, mouth open probably. I thought, ‘Oh my God, after 95 years, you said that?’ And I did. I wasn’t afraid any more because I was so old and it really didn’t matter, except for my family, what people thought.”
The audience cheered. “Afterwards, I sat down and I had a beer and I tell you, I have never been so happy in all my life. I was a new girl at 95.” She laughs, speaking on the phone from California. “So you might have me for 95 more years.” It changed her life, she says. Now 97, she has been embraced by the LGBTQ+ community and invited to events, but what means the most to her is the people who tell her they have been inspired by her. “That made me feel so wonderful. So many people have told me how I helped them come out, and their families understand now what is going on in their lives.” She hasn’t had one person, “to my face anyway”, say anything negative.
Blair played for the Peoria Redwings in the 1948 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League season, then had a long career working for the aerospace company Northrop Corporation, where, at that time, she feared she would be fired if she was open about her sexuality. She was, she says, “scared to death” of anyone finding out the truth. “In those days, they had no sympathy for gay people. And I didn’t know what my family would have thought. I couldn’t do it. I had to go out on dates with men I didn’t want to go out with. But I did – and I looked halfway decent, I think, because they kept asking me out. I just walked this straight and narrow path. It was hard sometimes, but I did it.” She shrugged off comments from people wondering why she had never married, saying she hadn’t found the right man. “That was my excuse.” To finally be open changed her life, she says. “You have no idea. It was a new world for me.”
She wishes she had come out sooner, she says, but more than that, she wishes we had a society where she had felt able to: “I would have liked to have come out right away if people would have accepted gay people.” But now, she says, she has a new lease of life. “The music is playing real loud now for me, and every step I take is a little more lively now that I can be who I am.” It has given her added energy to put into her current project: arranging for an international women’s baseball centre to be built in Illinois. “I think they should be able to have a home of their own for baseball. I’ve got a few things I still have to do before I get six feet under.”
It is common, even desirable, to change your life in your 40s, 50s and 60s, but what is it like to embark on something new and different in your 90s? Edith Murway-Traina, who died last year at the age of 101, took up weightlifting in her 90s and became the oldest competitive power lifter at 99. Charles Eugster, a British dentist, started bodybuilding in his 80s and became a sprinter at 95; he died in 2017, at 97. Last month, David Marjot, 95, celebrated his graduation day at Kingston University, where he attained a master’s in modern European philosophy, and is reportedly considering starting a PhD. These are the people showing it’s never too late, and you’re never too old.
In 2022, Mildred Kirschenbaum became a social media star at the age of 99. She was on a cruise with her son and daughter to celebrate her birthday; her daughter, Gayle, posted a video of Kirschenbaum contemplating her age. She was lucky, she said, that “I still have my marbles … and that I have a family who, I think, adores me. I’m not sure.” The video went viral. Then Kirschenbaum caught Covid, and in an update she told her fans, with typical verve, “I am finished with this fucking Covid!” In videos since then, she has sung, danced, reflected on her life and offered her thoughts, including on dealing with the hardships of childhood, and regrets (basically: don’t dwell). She has recently published a book, Mildred’s Mindset – part life advice, part memoir.
Now 100, how does Kirschenbaum feel about becoming an influencer? “I don’t know,” she says, slightly tetchily from her home in Florida – she’s waiting to be picked up to go to her bridge game. “I just don’t think about it. I don’t think about dying or anything. It’s like, que sera, whatever will be, will be.”
Has she always had a good attitude to ageing? “I don’t think about ageing, I really don’t. I can’t believe how old I am.” She has, however, always tried to have a positive attitude and to do new things, she says. “I’ll try anything, it doesn’t matter. Within reason – tell me to climb up a mountain, I’ll say no.” But she doesn’t like it when other older people say, “I can’t do this and I can’t do that. They decide they’re old, that’s it. You’re never too old to try something new, to learn something. I learn something new every single day.”
Kirschenbaum was born in Brooklyn in 1923. You don’t, she observed in one of her videos, get to live a long life without a lot of heartache along the way. Her sister died of pneumonia as a child, her father tried to take his own life during the Great Depression, and in more recent years, Kirschenbaum coped with the death of one of her adult children, and her husband (to whom she was married for more than 60 years). She isn’t fazed by her newfound celebrity status.
“She doesn’t care at all, one bit,” says Gayle, who lives in New York. “It really doesn’t have all that much meaning to her. She cares about happy hour, and playing cards, and her family. A good cruise is important, too.” Gayle, a film-maker and forgiveness coach, previously made a documentary about the transformation of their relationship, from “difficult” to loving.
“My mission is to keep her going and to make sure she’s happy,” says Gayle. “I love that she brings joy to people and she inspires people. I joke that I created a monster but God forbid I say anything bad about her, because her fans will come after me. They worship her.”
We should remember, says David Sinclair, chief executive of the International Longevity Centre UK, that many of us, should we make it into our 90s, will not be lucky enough to grab all life’s opportunities. “Dementia and frailty and disability are extraordinarily high among people in their 90s,” he says. “That story you sometimes see of the 90-year-old skydiver is extraordinarily rare. There’s that caveat we have to think about.” But he would also like to see a society where people are encouraged to live full and interesting lives, and try new things, into their 90s and beyond. “Far too often we say to people, ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to bother any more’. It’s ageist and patronising. I think we’ve got to have more of a sense of what are the rights and responsibilities we should have, across our lives.”
There is, he says, “a perception that you shouldn’t try something new, and I think there is a self-imposed ageism”. It’s not always easy to overcome that, but “we should be finding ways to support people”. Promoting healthy lifestyles earlier, and social connectedness, are obviously vital – but so is access to opportunities, such as adult education, which has been slashed.
When a maths course for mature students was made available by his local authority, Derek Skipper jumped at the chance. In 2022, he passed his GCSE maths at the age of 92 – more than 75 years after he took the equivalent in the 1940s. For a couple of hours a week, he learned over Zoom and looked up extra YouTube tutorials (both of those online platforms were new to him). “I found I was quite enjoying it,” says Skipper, now 94. “The things that I did at school, which I had forgotten, started to come back a little bit. I found I was understanding maths. It was interesting. Just to realise how clever it is, something I hadn’t understood before.” He would love others to do the same. “What a great benefit it would be to the country in general if parents were able to go back to college, learn a bit of maths so they can encourage their children. So many people say, ‘I was hopeless at maths.’ They might suddenly find it’s not quite as bad as they thought.”
It was enough for Skipper, who had a career as a salesman, to have taken the GCSE and he says he isn’t planning to do anything else with it, even if he still enjoys plotting graphs in his spare time. It gave his brain a workout. “The maths course kept me much more interested than sitting down watching television. You feel as though you’re achieving something, you’re learning something.”
Last year, Bronwyn Herbert finished her PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia, at the age of 90, and is working out what she wants to do next. Though first, she says, she needs to tidy her study. “And pick up some of the friendships that I probably didn’t have time to work on. There’s always some ‘something’ to do,” she says. Herbert was pregnant when she was widowed at 23. After her daughter was born, the first of four children, she went back to live with her family and her brother, a lecturer, told her of a new course in social work his university was launching. “When my baby girl was old enough, I went back to university and started doing social work.” Aside from taking time to raise her children, Herbert spent her career in social work, only retiring at 81 so she could think about doing a PhD.
She had worked a lot with homeless families, and over her long career had seen the effects of generational homelessness. “I wondered what we could have done differently to prevent this occurring. When I researched it, there was very little to read about what homeless children or grownups thought about how their lives have been affected. There was a big gap in the literature. I decided I needed to investigate that. So that’s how I came to start my thesis.”
She completed it despite several difficult and traumatic events – Herbert had a heart operation, then a fall that put her in hospital for three months. Her adult son died in an accident, and then her husband died. “I lost interest in it for a while. Anyhow, I got going again and I completed it.” She is, she says, “very happy to have finished it”.
What has she learned about following her dreams in her 90s? “I think if I set out to do something, I’ve always then achieved it as much as I possibly could. I was just very delighted to live this long to achieve it. There’s always a lot of things to do in life.” There are parts of her thesis that she would like to develop and work on further, particularly around effective and good parenting, but she is still thinking about it. “I look forward to a new challenge. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ll be ready for it.”
Herbert seems like a youngster compared to Sarah Yerkes, who published her first collection of poetry at 101. Yerkes has always been creative – she was a landscape architect, then a sculptor, working into her 80s until the physical effort of sculpting became too much. When she moved to a retirement community in Washington DC in her 90s, she joined a poetry writing group and in 2019 published a collection of her poetry, Days of Blue and Flame, with reflections on creativity, as well as more emotional experiences in her long life, including the death of her five-year-old son. Celebrating her 104th birthday in 2022, she said writing had meant “a whole new world had opened up”. It was a “new occupation and a new group of friends”.
Yerkes will be 106 next month, and isn’t up for a phone call, nor for answering many of my questions relayed via one of her daughters. But she did say that, to her, poetry was like sculpture: “Putting things together.” Then she laughed and added, “What a cop-out.” I’d asked how she would define a good life. “Lots of love,” she said. “And hang on to it.”
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