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Significant older influencers

By Nick Jacobs 4 min read

If we could diagram our lives, beginning to end on a bell-shaped curve before we started the journey, it might allow us to approach things differently.

Lucky for me, starting at age 8, I was a paperboy. One of the most wonderful things about being a paperboy was all of the older people, most of them were women who were grandmothers, widows, or never-married schoolmarms, who showed me love, compassion, and kindness all along my 60 minute paper route. They invited me in for hot chocolate when it was too cold, gave me fresh-baked bread with homemade jelly, and generally shared their knowledge and wisdom with me.

I’ll readily admit it, I preferred my paper route’s older women. There was no confusing a grandmother with an older mother in those days, and they were amazing, wonderful, helpful, loving human beings who got the biggest kick out of spoiling me with their conversation, their kindness and their attention.

Truthfully, I’m aware now that I was serving a purpose for them as well because many of my paper route ladies didn’t drive, and except for church, Sunday school, and the beauty parlor, on any given day I might have been their only in-person, human conversation.

There was something else that came out of our mutual admiration society. I learned to seek out, latch onto and respect older people. In fact, as I look back over the past 50 years, I can name significant older influencers in every one of my jobs who enriched my life, taught me amazing things, and helped me to become a better teacher, arts administrator, convention bureau executive, hospital administrator, consultant and person.

My first adopted older person was Dick, the former choir director and high school principal. He was an amazing human being who taught me about patience, musical perfection, and most of all, about learning to enjoy life and love my students.

Then there was Walt, the retired pharmacist who adopted me as his project, and helped me get a new roof for the Art Center and solicit business donors.

At the same time there was my volunteer assistant, Dorothy, a retired elementary teacher, former Women’s Army Corp member in World War II, and single lady who told me she never got married because, “I never wanted to dance backwards.” There was Bill, our handyman and master of every trade, and Fred, a board member and former head of Grand Central Station, life-geniuses one and all.

Simultaneously, my most critically-important older mentor at that time was John, former head of a major local company, and later president of the Winston Corporation who took me under his wing to help teach me how to be an executive. He brought me into the leadership circles that allowed me to gain the self-confidence needed to move into healthcare administration.

Even today, my good 90-year-old friend, Dr. Larry and before him Zane and Dr. Wayne have all played significant roles in my life on many levels. Just for the record, all of these men and women were at least 20 to 40 or more years older than me.

I wrote this article because of a New York Times article entitled, “The Trick to Life is to Keep Moving,” by Devi Lockwood, in which she discusses what her friendship with a woman 51 years her senior taught her about growing up.

And she ended that insightful article by saying, “I would recommend that anyone in need of connection seek friends beyond the generational divide. What you find there might surprise you. We are more similar across generations than we are different: all human, all, to some extent, still figuring out who we are.”

“Please won’t you be my neighbor,” Fred Rogers

Nick Jacobs of Pittsburgh is a Senior Partner with Senior Management Resources and author of the blog healinghospitals.com.

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