GBO NEWS: NYT’s New “Retiring” Column; Congress & Senior Entrepreneurs; Old Poets
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
Feb. 21, 2014 — Volume 14, Number 3
Editor’s Note: GBO News, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generation publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. If you receive the table of contents as an e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
IN THIS ISSUE: Sochi Headline Gold – for Pussy Riot (Keep Your Shirt on, Vladimir).
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS: Kerry Hannon Lands New York Times column; Elizabeth Isele Gives Congressional Testimony on “Second Acts”
2. CONFERENCE BEAT: American Society on Aging (ASA) Conference (San Diego, March 11-15) to Have First Pressroom Since 2008; What’s Next Boomer Business Conference Within ASA to Highlight Product, Service Trends; Conference Also to Have Special Screening of Documentary on Innovative Care Home; ***Application Deadline Set for National Press Foundation’s 10th Retirement Issues program (all expenses paid).
3. THE BOOKMOBILE: Speaking for My Self: Twelve Women Poets in their Seventies and Eighties; ***Living in the Land of Limbo: Fiction and Poetry About Family Caregiving to be Paper and eBook.
4. STORY BOARD: Baby boomers ill-prepared to retire, national retirement institute says,” Cox Newspapers *** “For aging transgender population, retirement can be bittersweet refuge,” Ryan Schuessler, Al Jazeera America *** “Why Are So Many Elderly Asians Killing Themselves?” Rob O’Brien, Global Post; ***High Elder U.S. Suicide Rates, Paula Span, New York Times’ “Old New Age” *** “Immigrants Facing Death Without Home Hospice Support,” Daniela Gerson, Alhambra Source/New America Media. *** “In Texas, Elderly Population Gets Help from Aging Care Workers,” Veronica Zaragovia, KUT Public Radio/New America Media.
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS
***Kerry Hannon Kicked Off Her New New York Times “Retiring” column on Feb 8 with “For Many Older Americans, an Enterprising Path.” The Saturday column evolved from Hannon’s freelance contributions to the paper’s “Retirement” and “Wealth” sections in recent years. The prolific Hannon also blogs regularly for Forbes, AARP and PBS’ Next Avenue. Her most recent book is Great Jobs for Everyone 50+ (Wiley/AARP 2012).
GBO Newsies can read her inaugural column (and others) yourselves, but this bit of research caught our eye. Hannon reports, “According to a recent study published by the Kauffman Foundation and Legal Zoom, in 2013, about 20 percent of all new businesses were started by entrepreneurs aged 50 to 59 years, and 15 percent were 60 and over.
And, in fact, over the last decade, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to those in the 55-to-64 age group, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.”
***Also on business end of senior news, Forbes and Next Avenue blogger Elizabeth Isele was making some of her own delivering her first congressional testimony, Feb. 12. She testified before a joint hearing of the U.S. Senate’s aging and small business committees, titled, “In Search of a Second Act: The Challenges and Advantages of Senior Entrepreneurship.” Isele spoke as the successful co-creator of organizations, such as SeniorEntrepreneurshipWorks.org, to educate and train often lower-income elders how to launch and sustain small businesses. Her eProvStudio.com is an incubation workshop for 50-plus entrepreneurs. (On the editorial side, she’s not only been prolific but as a children’s-book author Isele is a winner of the Caldecott Medal the Pulitzers of kid lit.
She told Congress that senior entrepreneurs and employed adults 65 or older contribute over $120 billion in federal taxes alone (plus state taxes and with a reduction in use of entitlement programs). Not all of those tax billions come from aging professionals. Pointing to seniors involved in “artisanal capitalism,” Isele cited Pearl Malkin, age 90, aka “Kickstarter Granny.” She launched her business, Happy Canes, after her grandson “helped her launch a successful $3,000 Kickstarter campaign for seed money” and sells them on the Etsy online marketplace.
Isele told the senators, “We need to stop the gloom and doom we are generating by referring to this huge and rapidly expanding demographic as an impending crisis or ‘Silver Tsunami.’ We, as a society, need to recognize seniors are one of our greatest natural resources. They are not a silver tsunami; they are a silver lining, yielding golden dividends.” Rather than urge Congress to create new multimillion-dollar programs, she called on them to back “tweaking existing federal programs and public policy.”
Isele called on Congress to “foster inclusive entrepreneurship,” for example, by supporting initiatives that “reach out to traditionally excluded communities such as 50+ year olds and 50+ year-olds with disabilities” by making business-development support services available to them.
Also, she said, Washington should create greater access to capitalization for senior entrepreneurs, such as by designing ways “to mitigate special obstacles senior entrepreneurs face, such as age bias from lending institutions” and developing more microcredit initiatives to target special populations like seniors with strong chances of success. [How about for some aging journalists?]
Isele’s other recommendations ranged from making Small Business Administration “business startup support more accessible and easy to understand” to prohibiting “bias against hiring long-term unemployed seniors” to several tax and regulatory changes to promote startups.
Others testifying at the hearing were Greg O’Neill of the Gerontological Society of America’s public policy arm, the National Academy for an Aging Society; Conchy Bretos, CEO, MIA Senior Living Solutions, which develops affordable assisted living projects for lower-income seniors; Kenneth Yancey, CEO of SCORE; and Tameka Montgomery,of the Small Business Administration.
Link to the CSPAN video or, again, catch both a video (choppier than CSPAN) of the hearing and written testimony on the U.S. Senate website.
2. CONFERENCE BEAT
***The Aging in America Conference, in San Diego, March 11-15, will have a pressroom for the first time since 2008. The conference, run by the American Society on Aging (ASA), will be at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel. Veteran generations beat reporter Warren Wolfe, former staffer at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, organized a campaign to get ASA to reestablish a pressroom, and it will be open for reporters from Wednesday, March 12, to Friday, March 14.
Wolfe e-mailed GBO News, “That’s a big step up from last year, when we had to beg a room for one late-day gathering of journalists covering ASA in Chicago. For several years before that there were no amenities at all for those of us covering the meeting.”
The pressroom will be in Conference Parlor 606 — on the 6th floor of the Harbor Tower. Wolfe added, “I’m told it has a conference table for 6 people, two other chairs and a sofa, a TV and a small kitchenette. It’s open 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Stop in anytime to relax, connect or work. We’ll have a sign-in sheet just so you’ll know who else is at the conference.”
Reporters wishing to attend need to apply for a complimentary press registration with Jutka Mandoki, manager of member relations at ASA, at 415-974-9630, or jmandoki@asaging.org. Journalists should not assume their application will be accepted. And do not wait until a week before the conference to submit your request, or simply show up to register. The new pressroom space may not be staffed with someone who can offer media registrations.
Thursday gathering of journalists: Wolfe, a cofounder of the Journalists Network on Generations (which puts out GBONews) is organizing a gathering for any interested journalists in the pressroom on Thurs., March 13, 6-7:30 p.m. “These gatherings at ASA typically have been lively opportunities for all journalists attending the conference to meet and share ideas, sources and the stories and topics we’re covering. It’s for any electronic or print reporters, editors, bloggers, producers or those in related fields. (If the pressroom is too small, we’ll find a larger room for our gathering and post a sign at the pressroom),” he said.
Before arriving, reporters should check out the schedule of sessions online. You also can search sessions for specific topics, speakers or presenters from a specific state. Go to the conference website and click on “Search the Sessions” for specific subjects. Wolfe noted, “I use it to find presenters from Minnesota” — and this winter there should be plenty in San Diego.
Reporters can direct questions to Wolfe at 612-791-5316; or e-mail him at warrren.wolfe11@gmail.com.
*** “What’s Next” Conference Inside the ASA Conference, March 12: Journalists attending ASA’s Aging in America meeting will find a warm press welcome at the What’s Next Boomer Business Summit. This one-day program, started 12 years ago, is often the best-focused section of the whole conference. The concentration is on business developments, including consumer trends and how that translates into new products and services for an aging nation. Speakers include the top people at the business end of aging.
Some of the program sessions are: “A Broad Look at Commerce Trends – Who, Why, How Will They Buy?”; “Boomer and Senior Housing Trends,” “2014 Perspectives on Why Technology Adoption Matters”; and sessions on big data, health trends, weight loss and “diabesity” fitness trends, serving military veterans, the caregiving business, and much more.
Among the authors and journalists participating will be Gail Sheeehy, nationally published generations-beat reporter Sally Abrahms, Reuter’s blogger Mark Miller, “Beacon” senior-press publisher (Washington, D.C./Baltimore), former Los Angeles Times economics correspondent Bob Rosenblatt, top market-trends blogger Laurie Orlov and many more.
To request a complimentary press pass to the event (including the press conference), arrange interviews or ask questions, contact: Lori Bitter, President/Senior Strategist, The Business of Aging , Lori@loribitter.com.
*** A Special Advance Screening of Segments of, Homes on the Range, to be a two-hour PBS special on innovations in elder care, will be the core of a conference workshop on March 13, 8-9 a.m. The location will be the Manchester Grand Hyatt ‘s Balboa C (2nd floor, Seaport Tower).
Early risers will be treated to a moving, 20-minute look at an innovative Green House project, one of the small and humane replacements for traditional nursing homes, this one built and operating in tiny Sheridan, Wyo.
The film marks 10 years since the long-term care pioneer Bill Thomas, MD, opened the first Green House in Tupelo, Miss. The final documentary will also be a sequel to PBS’s 2002 breakthrough documentary, And Thou Shalt Honor, on eldercare in America.
On hand at the screening/workshop will be co-producer Dale Bell, who with Harry Wiland not only created both productions, but established the Santa Monica-based nonprofit Media & Policy Center Foundation. Before becoming a public television powerhouse on a range of social issues, Bell, among other projects, was the producer of 1970’s Woodstock: The Movie. Reporters can contact Bell at 310.828.2966 x 101; cell: 818.398.4562; e-mail: dale@mediapolicycenter.org.
***Application Deadline for the National Press Foundation’s 10th Retirement Issues program is March 24 at noon EST. The all-expenses-paid program will be held in Washington, D.C., May 21-24. The fellowship includes airfare and some other transportation costs, lodging and most meals. Details and the online application are on the NPF website. For information contact Jenny Ash-Maher, program assistant (jenny@nationalpress.org); 202-663-7285.
3. THE BOOKMOBILE
***Speaking for My Self: Twelve Women Poets in their Seventies and Eighties,
edited by Sondra Zeidenstein, paper, $18, is just out from Chicory Blue Press, Goshen, Conn. Poet and Chicory Blue Publisher Zeidenstein, who started the imprint 25 years ago, says on her website, she decided to “publish older women writers because I need company.”
Speaking for My Self includes a dozen seasoned poets, such as the superb Nellie Wong, Nancy Kassell, Myra Shapiro–and Zeidenstein. The latter, who has “followed the work of almost all of them for decades,” asked the other poets to submit verse they had written after age 75.
Zeidenstein notes, “I told them I was not looking particularly for poems about aging, just poems written in age: What is on our hearts as old women poets looking ahead, back, around. I didn’t know what the resulting collection of 60 poems would look like, though I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what might be revealed by such a concentration of old women writers in our mostly silenced generation.”
Poignantly, she comments, “The older I get – I’m now 81 — the more I find myself seeking older women writers to tell me about myself. I am still acutely aware of how skewed my understanding of myself was in the years of growing up, entering womanhood, married life, motherhood, when there were not many writers in whose work the texture of my life, my feelings, my side of the story as a woman had been transformed by the imagination. At this stage of my journey through life, I feel alone, again in a largely unimagined world. I need to read what is written from the perspective of older women so I can imagine myself part of a varied, vital community, not as an anonymous, marginalized, stereotyped ‘senior.’ But there are not enough of us. From the point of view of age and gender, we are the most under represented among published writers; older women writers from minority cultures are even scarcer.”
Visit the Chicory Blue Press website. Contact Zeidenstein at (860) 491-2271, or e-mail her at sondraz@optonline.net.
***Living in the Land of Limbo: Fiction and Poetry About Family Caregiving, which GBO News mentioned in our last issue with a kvetch about the hardcover academic press pricing at $49.95, will be available in paper at $24.95 and, better yet, as an e-book at $9.95. Just go online to Vanderbilt University Press. Again, the collection, edited by nonfiction author and family caregiving expert, Carol Levine, is “the first anthology of short stories and poems about family caregivers … men and women [who] find themselves in ‘limbo,’ as they struggle to take care of a family member or friend in the uncertain world of chronic illness.” Entries are by such luminaries as Gish Jen, Li-Young Lee, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Raymond Carver, Mary Gordon, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon and Alice Munro. Journalists can request advance reading copies from or set up interview with Levine via Sue Havlish, 615-343-2446, sue.havlish@vanderbilt.edu.
4. THE STORY BOARD
*** “Baby boomers ill-prepared to retire, national retirement institute says,” Cox Newspapers (Feb. 19 — un-bylined version in the Cox-owned Tampa Tribune.)” A comfortable retirement is becoming more elusive for aging Americans, many of whom will have no choice but to work well into their golden years. Sparse savings, fewer pension plans, stagnant home values and rising health care costs have created a scenario in which many of the country’s 70 million-plus baby boomers — who began retiring in earnest in 2011 — will struggle to live as well as their parents in old age.”
*** “For aging transgender population, retirement can be bittersweet refuge,” by Ryan Schuessler (Al Jazeera America, Feb.20). “At home, Alice can live as the woman she knows she is. But at work, she has to use her ‘boy name’ — the one on her birth certificate. . . . At 60, Alice has been forced to make the choice between living an authentic life and living her retirement in poverty. . . . In Missouri, where she lives, Alice could still be fired for being transgender. . . . as more and more transgender individuals get older . . . shortfalls in health care could mean the difference between life and death for some. Discrimination in retirement communities or assisted-living facilities could tarnish the golden years, and a later-in-life transition could leave some ostracized from the families they’ve loved their whole lives . . . For a transgender baby boomer such as Alice, retirement could offer a relief from the workplace discrimination and the double life many have begrudgingly become used to. . . .”
*** “Why are so many elderly Asians killing themselves?” by Rob O’Brien, of Global Post (Feb. 17), reports on the “astonishing spikes in the rate of Asians over 65 choosing to end their lives early, particularly in the region’s economically successful countries,” such as South Korea, Taiwan and urban dwellers in China aged 70 to 74. For these Chinese elders, the suicide rate “surged to 33.76 per 100,000 in the mid-2000s, up from 13.39 in the 1990s. And these numbers are expected to rise.” Comparable 65-plus suicide rates declined in recent years, writes O’Brien, among 30 economically advanced nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, from 16.17 per 100,000 in 1990 to 13.29 in 2010. In the United States, elderly suicides accounted for 14.3 per 100,000 in 2007.” O’Brien cites a 2009 Chinese-authored study of 304 elderly suicides, which found that along with China’s one-child per couple policy of the past three decades, elders had been ‘hit hard by China’s booming economy and socio-economic changes. As people flock to urban centers for work, the family unit has splintered.’”
*** For a U.S. backgrounder on high elder U.S. suicide rates, Paula Span wrote a good overview last fall in her New York Times “Old New Age” blog last fall (Aug. 7, 2013).
*** “Immigrants Facing Death Without Home Hospice Support,” Alhambra Source/New America Media, (Feb 20) by Daniela Gerson. Alice Bian’s sells ritual Chinese afterlife items and clothes for the dead. But she didn’t know her husband could have died at home through hospice, not hospitalized.
*** “In Texas, Elderly Population Gets Help from Aging Care Workers,” KUT Public Radio/New America Media , (Feb. 18) by Veronica Zaragovia. Similar life experiences build a bond between seniors and aging care workers, but caregivers may do backbreaking work to supplement Social Security.
If you have technical problems receiving issues of GBO News or if you’d like to be removed from the list, simply auto-reply to this e-mail of GBO News, or phone me at 415-503-4170 ext. 133 (e-mail: pkleyman@newamericamedia.org). GBO News especially thanks Sandy Close of New America Media, and our cyber-guru, Kevin Chan.
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online with in-kind support from New America Media (NAM). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. NAM is an online, nonprofit news service reaching 3,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States. GBO News readers are invited to visit the NAM website, and click on the Ethnic Elders section logo on the right side. Opinions expressed in GBO do not represent those of NAM. Copyright 2014, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
To subscribe of unsubscribe, or if you have technical problems receiving issues of GBO or if you’d like to be removed from the list, e-mail me at pkleyman@newamericamedia.org or phone me at 415-503-4170 ext. 133.