Turning 80 years old in old-time Phoenix

I will turn 80 in Phoenix. No, not real soon, but someday. Well, in Glendale, which is a suburb of Phoenix. It's my greatest wish to live there until my time is done, which as far as I can tell, will be a long time from now! I will turn ninety, and chances are very good that I'll make it to 100, and maybe to 110! So naturally this morning I got to thinking about what it meant to turn eighty in old-time Phoenix.

Since we can time-travel, let's go back to old-time Phoenix, and turn eighty. My first thought, of course, is Sun City, which really isn't Phoenix, but it's in the Phoenix metropolitan area. It's January 1st, 1960, and in order to live in this retirement community, we need to be fifty.

OK, time to do some math. If we're 50 in 1960, we were born in 1910, right? And growing up in those days we would have seen some people turn 80 (mostly women), but not nearly as many as there would be in the future. But make no mistake, people did live 80+ years back in those days. My grandfather barely made it to 65, but my grandma, who was born in 1901, made it to 99. They lived in Minnesota, and whether the cold weather shortens, or lengthens, your life, I don't know.

Anyway, so while the young person at the bank may snicker at a 50-year-old person taking out a 30-year loan in 1960, many of those loans were completely paid. And over the years, even though Sun City changed its minimum age to 55, more and more people glided past eighty, or ninety, or one hundred.

Speaking for myself, the first time I heard of Sun City, back when I was in my twenties, all old people seemed about the same age to me, from 50 to 100. They had grey hair, seemed to complain about the government, and insisted that "that's not music, that's just noise!" But I'm older and wiser now, and I have a lot of time ahead of me to get much older, and much wiser.

Thank you for time-traveling with me!

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