As you get older, you can start to feel like you ll never achieve your dream, or receive recognition for your contributions to a field, or that your best work is behind you. Mo Rocca has compiled stories that demonstrate that you shouldn t give up hope and that, no matter your age, the best may yet be to come.
00:01:59.980And back in 2015, Chance the Rapper came on as a guest.
00:02:04.320And it was a really big crowd that turned out in Millennium Park in Chicago.
00:02:08.660And those of us on the show were kind of quizzing him on how you write a rap.
00:02:12.880And I thought, oh, here's a hokey question I can ask him that'll be an easy laugh.
00:02:18.600And I said, because at the time I was 46, I said, I'm 46.
00:02:23.020Is it too late for me to become a rapper?
00:02:26.120And, you know, it got a laugh, kind of an easy joke.
00:02:29.660But he looked at me dead on seriously.
00:02:32.920And without skipping a beat, he just said, I don't know.
00:02:36.460Some people might say it's too soon for you to become a rapper.
00:02:39.300And people laughed and the conversation moved on.
00:02:42.840But I was kind of thunderstruck because I realized in that moment that I'd fallen into the trap of thinking of myself as kind of over the hill at 46.
00:02:52.880And now I'm not suggesting that I'm going to become a rap star, but I think what he said to me had a lot of truth in it, which is that as you get older, you're only going to become more likely to have something meaningful to say, something to express creatively.
00:03:11.900And I'd fallen into that trap of thinking of life as kind of a series of sort of doors closing, of exits being, you know, shut off and of diminishing opportunities.
00:03:25.740And again, I was 46 and it's kind of nuts.
00:03:28.700So my eyes were opened and I was also kind of embarrassed that even though it was just a jokey question, that it came from a place of me thinking of myself as maybe past my prime.
00:03:39.300Yeah, I think a lot of us put those limitations on us because we have this idea in the culture that, okay, if you're going to be a great artist, you got to do it when you're in your 20s.
00:03:47.620Or if you're going to start up a startup, you got to do it in your 20s or 30s.
00:03:51.520But you highlight a lot of great people who did some really amazing things in the second half of their life.
00:03:56.640So besides, you know, being on a panel for Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, you're also a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning.
00:04:03.780So you get the opportunity to interview and spend time with people from all walks of life.
00:04:08.560And in your book, you talk about how you really, like you enjoy speaking to all these people, but you really enjoy speaking to the older ones.
00:05:05.960I did this cooking series for about four years called My Grandmother's Ravioli, where I went around the country learning to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers in their kitchen.
00:05:16.160And what I learned through doing that is that the older you get in general, the less you care about what other people think of you, which I think is where we all want to be.
00:05:25.420And so it's not a coincidence that my co-author, John Greenberg, and I could fill this book with stories of people accomplishing great things late in life, because I think as you get older, you're more unfettered.
00:05:38.000You're more just willing to go for it.
00:05:41.100In my experience, I think younger people tend to crowdsource not only their decisions, but kind of who they are and their personalities.
00:05:54.000But I think a lot of the qualities we ascribe to younger people about, oh, he really goes it alone or she really does it her way, they're really more applicable to older people.
00:06:05.420And I've noticed as well when I interact with older people, they lack self-consciousness, but in a good way.
00:06:12.200When my grandfather passed away a couple years ago, he's 100, and we were at the funeral and we were looking at photos of him from his life.
00:06:18.920And I was talking to my cousin, and I said, you know, Grandpa, he just didn't seem like he was thinking too much about himself all that often.
00:06:26.560And he's not the kind of guy that would need to download the Headspace app and meditate and figure out.
00:06:31.900But, you know, it wasn't like he wasn't, you know, that he was shallow or anything, that he wasn't curious, but he just wasn't thinking about himself.
00:06:41.780And I find that incredibly refreshing in a culture where everyone's just constantly thinking about themselves and where they stack up compared to everyone else.
00:06:51.000I'm trying to think this is going to be a little sloppy because I haven't worked it out, but it's almost like the camera is just shooting out, right?
00:07:00.220They're not looking at the reversal shot.
00:07:02.040They're not looking at the monitor, which would show you what the camera from the other side is looking at.
00:09:57.320And eventually what happened is he's able to sell the whole company for $2 million in 1964, which is about $20 million in today's money accounting for inflation.
00:11:00.600Well, this, I mean, I love these stories because I didn't know them before.
00:11:05.120And when we dug into this, you know, I said I wanted to include soldiers because what could be more counterintuitive for an older person to do?
00:11:16.080And so Samuel Whitmore, before we were the United States, he had served the crown, you know, in America as a royal dragoon, which just sounds really cool.
00:11:27.800He'd been in the French and Indian Wars.
00:11:29.560But the Stamp Act of 1765 really converted him to a revolutionary.
00:11:35.040He was very fervently pro-independence by the time the American Revolution started with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775.
00:11:44.320And on the very first day of battle, when Samuel Whitmore was already 78, he was there on the front lines.
00:11:52.280He picked off between one and three redcoats before he was shot in the face and had one of his cheeks blown off and then was stabbed in the head by a redcoat and left for dead.
00:12:05.480He survived against all the odds, and he lived another 18 years.
00:12:10.760So this guy, I mean, you know, we put in the book that, I mean, Clint Eastwood, who was 78 when he was in Gran Torino, this would be the perfect biopic for him.
00:12:21.280I mean, it's just an amazing, an amazing story.
00:12:24.260And of course, Samuel Whitmore's family did not want him doing this, but he felt so ardently, you know, pro-independence.
00:12:32.480He just couldn't help himself, and he became a legend, understandably, you know.
00:12:37.960I mean, really, half his face blown off and stabbed in the head and keeps going.
00:12:50.100He'd just be sitting on the porch in his rocking chair.
00:12:53.760And his answer he gave you, it surprised you.
00:12:56.360Yeah, well, General Wesley Clark was unfamiliar with this story and with another story we tell, which is about John L. Burns, a 70-year-old veteran of Gettysburg, who was almost kind of, you know, spooky music here, born the year that Samuel Whittemore died, as if passing the baton, or I guess in this case, the rifle.
00:13:15.560And John L. Burns became the only civilian known to have fought at Gettysburg and certainly is the only civilian with a monument to him at Gettysburg.
00:13:22.660And both those stories were unfamiliar to General Clark, and he said, you know, he could understand because when he, as a young man, had been injured in Vietnam, when he woke up the next morning and he looked around at other wounded soldiers, he immediately felt a sense of fraternity.
00:13:40.360He felt like that that was the initiation into this lifelong fraternity and service, you know.
00:13:49.920And so everything changed with that injury for him.
00:13:54.160And he believes that the fighting spirit really intensifies with age.
00:14:00.980And that part, I mean, I was fascinated by it, and I suppose, yeah, I was surprised by it.
00:14:06.020And I was also, I had to brag here, happy that I could tell him these stories, which he was unfamiliar with.
00:14:12.200And yeah, that Burns guy, he was interesting.
00:14:13.520So he's a civilian, and the war was basically in his front yard at Gettysburg.
00:14:17.540And he's like, well, I'm going to go there, take my musket.
00:14:19.900They gave him a rifle, and he saw action.
00:14:22.820And he became famous, and he kind of, he didn't handle fame very well.
00:14:26.320I think he kind of let it get to his head.
00:14:28.260Yeah, I think he was apparently kind of blustery.
00:14:30.360I mean, one of the funny things, by the way, just I had to add, is that he had fought as a very young man in the battle of, in the war of 1812.
00:14:37.900But by the time the Mexican-American War came along, and he tried to enlist in 1846, he was already too old.
00:14:44.340So cut to 1863, and he's really too old, you know, as far as the military goes.
00:14:50.020And he takes this kind of sinecure of a job as a constable, and it happens to be in the town of Gettysburg.
00:14:58.700So the war wouldn't let him go to it, but the war came to him, in a sense.
00:15:04.880So, I mean, as luck would have it, he's in this little town, and the biggest conflict of the Civil War happens to arrive on his doorstep.
00:15:14.860And so he grabs his very outdated uniform, his very outdated artillery.
00:15:24.940And he eventually, it's, I believe, with a, I might have this wrong, it's a Wisconsin or a Michigan militia.
00:15:31.940He manages to fight with them, and he does indeed kill, I believe, three Confederates.
00:15:38.420And that night, he's sort of stranded.
00:15:41.280When the Confederates find him, he manages to convince them that he was just out and about looking for his wife, why he would be wearing that, who knows.
00:15:48.640But they let him go, and he meets Lincoln when Lincoln comes to Gettysburg later.
00:15:54.940And, yeah, he becomes a real braggart, really blustery.
00:15:58.700Eventually, he succumbs to dementia and is found wandering the streets of New York City and dies a few years later.
00:16:07.040You know, I took, I was inspired by their sense of public service, their duty to country when they were fighting for a world that, at best, they'd enjoy for a few years.
00:16:26.060People who put their butts on the line, and these two guys did, you know, really, truly, I mean, put their lives on the line, fighting for something that they believed in, which even if they were successful, they would only reap the rewards for a very short time.
00:16:45.760I mean, young soldiers, young civil rights activists, those people are heroic, of course, because oftentimes they end up losing what could have been long lives at a very early age.
00:16:57.780But there's something in a very particular way that's very, very profound, I think, about older people who dedicate themselves to public service and, in this case, quite literally fighting for their country.
00:17:10.240So, as we mentioned earlier, there's this romantic idea that if you want to do your best work as an artist, writer, painter, musician, you got to do it when you're young.
00:17:21.980I think it comes from this, the romantic era with Keats and Byron.
00:17:25.780Like, if you don't get it before you're 30, like, you're hoes.
00:17:50.460Well, I mean, Falling Water, this home that he built for a department store family owners in western Pennsylvania, not terribly far from Pittsburgh, quite literally on a stream, on a falls, built around the water and the rocks, integrating nature into it.
00:18:06.980Put Frank Lloyd Wright on the cover of Time magazine, which then was a really big deal.
00:18:13.280So, Frank Lloyd Wright was already a great innovator, seen, hailed as a great innovator and master by his middle age.
00:18:19.720But then the world of architecture moved on, and he was seen as yesterday's news, certainly as the international style came into vogue.
00:18:28.680And he was in his late 70s when he received the commission from the Guggenheim family for a new museum in New York.
00:18:37.840He was 84 when he submitted the design for it, and he had the leading artists of the day, those who would be exhibited in that structure, completely in opposition to him because they saw the design, which was actually a design that he resurrected from a Maryland car park, believe it or not.
00:18:57.780That was going to be in the, I always mispronounce this, the Catocton, I think I have it right, mountains in Maryland that hadn't happened earlier.
00:19:06.260He had taken this design and he sort of pulled it out and refreshed it for the Guggenheim Museum.
00:19:12.680And these artists saw it and said, this is more about the architecture than our art.
00:19:34.740And that museum is as much a part of the environment of New York City and of Central Park, it sits on the edge of it, as falling water is to Western Pennsylvania.
00:19:47.060So, I mean, I think it takes, certainly Frank Lloyd Wright had an ego, but it takes a sense of self along with a great talent to push through this idea, Brett, that you're talking about, that you basically have an era and that's it.
00:20:04.600Frank Lloyd Wright was too much of an artist and believed too much in himself to not push through that.
00:20:10.860And I think it's that pushing through that I really admire in a lot of these people and people in life in general who, you know, buck up against this idea that your time has passed, gracefully bow out.
00:20:25.300Frank Lloyd Wright was not going to allow that to happen to himself.
00:21:50.260Well, this is in a section of the book called Loss and to Gain.
00:21:53.060And it's something that a few of the people have in common in late-in-life achievers, which is that whether by design or by instinct, they turn loss into gain.
00:22:04.120And it's almost as if obstacles force them to sort of become reborn.
00:22:14.840And it's almost like – I don't know.
00:23:45.280He had to recline in a wheelchair or in a bed.
00:23:47.480But he was not content to just sort of sit around, receive visitors, and sort of play a highlights reel of his greatest hits in his mind or to others.
00:23:59.180So instead, he traded his paintbrush in for a giant pair of scissors and began cutting big shapes out of colored paper, paper that had been painted.
00:24:09.840He still had assistants with him, and he would have them pin these paper cutouts to the walls of his room.
00:24:19.620And I'm lucky enough to live in New York where MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, has the swimming pool, one of the great paper cutout works of art, remounted there.
00:24:29.240And you can see up close lots of little pinholes because he was still very meticulous about where they were positioned, move it this way, move it that, and take the pins – move the pins with it.
00:24:40.760However, the work itself – and I think this is very significant – there's something childlike about it, not childish but childlike, the bright colors, the big shapes.
00:24:53.040And Matisse himself viewed the work as a second life for him and a kind of return to childhood because there was, he said, a lack of complication in the work.
00:25:04.380It was unburdened by too much thought.
00:25:08.400And I think a lot of these stories share that with the Matisse story, which is people returning to their childhoods in different ways, sometimes literally, like the writers, Frank McCourt and Laura Ingalls Wilder writing about their childhoods.
00:25:22.120Sometimes with people going back to their childhood to finish something that they started, like the Queen Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist, Brian May, who had been studying astrophysics before he became a guitar – before he joined Queen, returning at age 60 to complete his PhD in astrophysics.
00:25:38.980So there's a lot of this sort of returning to a first love or just even a childlike outlook that is very powerful, I think.
00:25:49.880Yeah, and I think it's inspiring too, these guys.
00:25:52.000They embrace the limitations that come with old age.
00:25:54.480Like it's – I think there's – we have a culture where we're just constantly fighting against old age.
00:25:59.940Like we're just doing all the exercising, taking supplements and doing Botox and peptides just to fight off old age.
00:26:09.160But there's something kind of unseemly about it as well at the same time.
00:26:12.400Well, I think a lot of it ends up making people actually seem older in a weird way, right?
00:26:18.840Like I think the people who embrace their age and their aging actually seem more energetic and youthful and certainly more at peace.
00:26:28.400Yeah, so find out how you can turn your limitations into assets like these guys.
00:26:33.680You also highlight several people in the book who did amazing work throughout their lives, but they weren't recognized for it until they reached elderhood.
00:27:00.140Like, you know, Van Gogh, great artist, dies very young, largely unrecognized in his time.
00:27:05.640And to me, there's something very sad about that.
00:27:07.520You wish that some people that died young and were recognized later could come back from the dead just so that they could be like, wow, people really did actually appreciate what I did.
00:27:17.420These stories, there are three that are like the opposite of that, including Tyrus Wong, who lived until 106 and towards the very end of his life finally received recognition.
00:27:27.900Tyrus Wong had grown up extremely poor in China, so poor that in his village they had to hang the poultry on ropes from the ceiling so that the rats couldn't get to them on the dirt floor.
00:27:41.100When he was eight years old, his father took him to America.
00:27:44.640He never saw his mother and sister again.
00:27:46.280He was for a month on Angel Island where immigrants would come in in California near Los Angeles, was separated from his father for a month, which alone would have been traumatic, right?
00:27:57.120You leave your mother and your sister and you're just with your father and then you're separated for a month.
00:28:00.660The father then got a job as a laborer but saw talent in his young son and earned the money to send his son, Tyrus, to the Otis Art Institute in Pasadena.
00:28:15.940As a young man, he was actually exhibited at the Art Institute in Chicago.
00:28:20.240And he made his way to Walt Disney, to Buena Vista Studios.
00:28:24.200And there he worked on the movie Bambi.
00:28:27.080Disney had already had a big success in feature films with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but Bambi had a completely different look.
00:28:35.180Instead of clear, bright lines, people will remember that it's much more evocative of the forest and the moisture.
00:28:44.000And that was due to Tyrus Wong, who was doing backgrounds.
00:28:47.720And Walt Disney himself was so impressed that Tyrus had sort of combined the Impressionists, whom he'd studied, with the brushwork of the Song Dynasty, of the Chinese Song Dynasty.
00:29:00.020So everything was much more impressionistic.
00:29:45.800And he had been working very, very late in life.
00:29:49.720But his story and two others in this section of the book have one thing in common, very, very long marriages that they credited with getting them through very rough patches in life.
00:30:05.720Tyrus Wong was married, I believe, for 58 years.
00:30:08.180And, you know, if you're going to continue pursuing something, certainly like art, and you're not going to be really recognized, you're going to need somebody, I think these stories tell us, who is going to be your champion in life and is going to help you get through those downturns.
00:30:26.080I imagine, too, it helped having another way to, I don't know, feel good, like another mission in life.
00:30:31.180If the only thing he had going on in his life was his work, didn't have family, well, if your work didn't work out, like, you're hosed.
00:30:38.420You don't have another thing to fall back on.
00:30:42.840And I think you can even see it in the photographs of Tyrus Wong.
00:30:46.400You can see, first of all, when he talks about his wife and how taking care of her as she went into a slow decline and died years before he did was the most important work of his life.
00:30:59.960And, actually, one of my colleagues, Tracy Smith, who was a correspondent at Sunday Morning, actually interviewed him before he died.
00:31:07.780And that's how I learned about the story.
00:31:09.360And you can just feel the love coming off the guy.
00:31:13.020Another person you highlight that worked tirelessly to build a career but didn't experience success and recognition to later life was the actress Estelle Getty, better known as Sophia from the Golden Girls.
00:31:25.340She had dreamed of being an actor from a young age, and she took steps to make that happen, but it didn't really happen for her for a long time.
00:31:43.360But Estelle Getty was such an interesting story, and she played, as you pointed out, she played the mother Sophia on the Golden Girls, a hilarious character.
00:31:49.260But the other three Golden Girls had all had big careers from early on, and, you know, I think it's fair to say they had really put their career center, and good for them.
00:32:01.260Estelle Getty had actually wanted to act from a very early age.
00:32:04.780She grew up in the Lower East Side of New York.
00:32:07.360Her father, who was working class, would take the family to the Academy of Music when she was just a kid to see Baudville and early talkies.
00:32:14.960And she had gone to the Catskills to wait tables and try her hand at stand-up comedy.
00:32:24.420And raising a family just made it impossible for her to pursue her career full-time, at least at that time.
00:32:31.700She did take whatever small parts in place she could get.
00:32:36.900You know, by the time she was in her 50s, she joked that she was just getting parts as mothers, as Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers.
00:32:44.340She once said she played everyone's mother except Attila the Hun's mother.
00:32:48.560And when her kids went off to college in the 70s, she kind of turned her focus back and said, I'm not done yet.
00:33:15.740And she basically forced herself on the playwright.
00:33:18.780She said to him, I want you to write a part for me.
00:33:21.520And I think he was so taken aback and charmed that he did it.
00:33:25.780He wrote a part for her as the mother in what became Torch Song Trilogy, which was a very, very big play on Broadway, very important in the 80s.
00:34:06.520And I think the lesson there is sometimes you've just got to put it on the line and ask for what you want because it could change the whole course of your life.
00:34:13.480What happened to Getty's career after Golden Girls?
00:35:28.140And Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman had been on it together.
00:35:31.460But they had had opposite career trajectories.
00:35:34.680She had already been a star from West Side Story.
00:35:37.200And she had taken this role on a PBS show.
00:35:39.380So she'd moved to New York with her husband and daughter and thought, all right, I'm in my 40s, which at that time was considered old for actresses.
00:35:58.120And he had been struggling for a long time.
00:36:01.660And he didn't love being on The Electric Company.
00:36:05.180And there was actually some tension between them.
00:36:07.200They ultimately became very good friends and remained close.
00:36:10.520But so their stories were sort of intertwined.
00:36:12.760And doing this book, you know, it was interesting to learn about how Morgan Freeman had come up.
00:36:17.860You know, he served a stint in the Air Force.
00:36:20.380He went to L.A. to become an actor, but he always had integrity.
00:36:25.300He had quit a job with the San Francisco Opera that included what he felt was a denigrating stereotype of an American Indian.
00:36:32.700He had walked out of a television commercial audition because there was a part called The Jew, actually called The Jew.
00:36:38.560So he had a real moral backbone from the beginning, even when he was struggling, really struggling.
00:36:45.880And he said, you know, there was a great possibility he could have ended up homeless because, you know, he was putting everything he could into acting.
00:36:52.380And if it hadn't succeeded, you know, things would have looked really, really bad.
00:36:58.440And on Electric Company, he was frustrated.
00:37:01.480And Rita Moreno said, you know, look, we didn't know how much talent this guy had.
00:37:05.180It was then after that, that he made his feature film debut when he was well into his 40s.
00:37:13.820It was in the Robert Redford movie, Brubaker.
00:37:16.600And then in his early 50s, he had an Oscar nomination for a movie called Street Smart.
00:37:22.900But then he had a real banner year that included both Glory, which he co-starred in with Denzel Washington, and Driving Miss Daisy when he was 52, although he was playing a 60-year-old then.
00:37:34.560But it's very funny because an interviewer once asked him about the struggle of being an older actor.
00:37:40.400And he said, I can't tell you about the struggle of being an older actor.
00:37:43.640I can tell you about the struggle of being a younger actor.
00:37:46.840And I think he – there are actors out there.
00:37:50.200I think Angela Lansbury was – even though she had been a success early on, but there are actors who grow into their roles, who somehow they're meant for real success later.
00:38:02.180Because – maybe because in the case of Morgan Freeman, that great voice and that gravitas he had.
00:38:07.400I mean, you can't play God when you're in your 20s.
00:38:10.460And no one has played God like Morgan Freeman or sounded like it.
00:38:14.220Since he turned 60, he's been in 80 movies.
00:38:17.940I mean, that is the opposite of what we think of as a Hollywood career.
00:38:21.900Yeah, Clint Eastwood had – I mean, he was a big star when he was young.
00:38:25.520But I'm always amazed that he's kept on producing and acting even in his 70s, 80s, and 90s.
00:38:31.200Well, I think Clint Eastwood – and actually, I'm not bragging here.
00:38:34.300As a college kid, I got to meet Clint Eastwood.
00:38:39.120But Clint Eastwood is amazing because to be this international film star, you know, known for Dirty Harry and Spaghetti Westerns, and then to say, no, I want to make movies and I want to make good movies.
00:38:52.320And, you know, we forget now, but there were so many naysayers early on.
00:38:57.100And Clint Eastwood has made so many different kinds of movies.
00:39:00.320And, I mean, talk about somebody who is not concerned with what other people think of him and just does it and has continued to grow.
00:39:09.940And like we were talking about before, just not respecting this idea, this artificial idea that you have a sort of an arc that you kind of have to observe, that you do one thing.
00:39:21.600And then when you've peaked, you know, that's kind of it.
00:39:28.780How did Mr. Pickles end up on the rock-to-genarian list?
00:39:32.360Well, we wanted to, John and I wanted to include personal milestones and because not to make them all career or even creative or entrepreneurial, you know, or sports, you know, late in life achievement, but personal ones like, you know, marriage and parenthood.
00:39:49.560And Mr. Pickles is a Houston Zoo tortoise.
00:39:52.280I say is because he's expected to live for many more years like most radiated tortoises.
00:39:58.120And he became a first-time father at 90.
00:40:00.940And, you know, you were impressed by Al Pacino, you know, fathering a kid at 83.
00:40:05.260He was just a kid in comparison with Mr. Pickles.
00:40:08.020Mr. Pickles has, by the way, the three kids are named Jalapeno, Dill, and Gherkin.