Mo Rocca's (Really) Late Bloomers

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. Have you ever had the thought that you're too late to debut on Broadway, too late to write a book? Maybe you believe that you're too old to get married or swim from The Bahamas to Florida? If so, our next guest has a different point of view, and our next guest is Mo Rocca, who so many of you know from his frequent appearances on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! or CBS Sunday Mornings and elsewhere.

Mo is with us to talk about his new book, Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs. In it, he chronicles the lives and successes of people from Carol Channing to Colonel Sanders proving that it's never too late to try something new. Now, he joins us to share some of those stories. Mo Rocca, always great to have you on this show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mo Rocca: Thank you, Brian. So good to be with you. Thank God I wasn't late. The train was on time.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. If you were late, there would've been a price to pay, but what exactly is a roctogenarian?

Mo Rocca: A roctogenarian is someone who does not accept the conventional wisdom that the last third of life is a time to wind down because look, if life is a three-act play, you don't want the critics falling asleep during Act Three. We are living longer than ever before. The CDC just said that after a few years of reversal, that life expectancy is on the rise again, and will continue to rise.

People live long enough to have whole other lives after the traditional age of retirement. My co-author Jonathan Greenberg, and I wanted to tell stories of people who lived these full exciting lives at a time in life that people would think ordinarily is too old.

Brian Lehrer: You confess and we'll go through some examples of people you interview in the book, and we'll invite our listeners to tell us some of their own roctogenarian stories, but you confess, if that's the right word, to enjoying interviews with older people the most. Why do you love talking to the elderly or senior citizens, or whatever term you want to use?

Mo Rocca: They have better stories. They know who they are. They have more clarity on what matters to them. This is key. I learned this during my cooking show where I traveled around the country cooking with grandmothers and grandfathers in their kitchens. They care less about what other people think of them than young people do. The qualities we ascribe to the young actually apply more to older people. They're more willing to do it their own way and to go for it.

Brian Lehrer: Your book features several mini-biographies of people who triumphed in their last act. Before we hear some of those stories, there's one in your introduction that surprised me of all people you credit, Chance the Rapper, a 31-year-old. We're changing your perspective on aging. How did that come about?

Mo Rocca: In 2015, I made an appearance on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! which had been on for over 20 years. Chance the Rapper was the guest. The audience was going crazy. It was outdoor in Millennium Park in Chicago. I had this sticky question that I thought would be an easy laugh. We were talking to Chance the Rapper about his writing technique, and I said to him, "I'm 46. Is it too late for me to become a rapper?" It got a laugh, a hacky joke. Without skipping a beat, totally straight, he said, "I don't know. Some people might say it's too soon for you to become a rapper."

People laughed at that as well, but I was thunderstruck by that because I thought, "Oh my God. I've already fallen into the trap of thinking that I'm over the hill." I was embarrassed and ashamed when I realized that. Look, my beatboxing is not where it should be. I'm not suggesting that I'm going to become a rapper in my 50s or 60s. The truth is that as I get older, I probably will have something more meaningful to say artistically. I think it applies just to a lot of things. It's easy to fall into that trap when you're as young as, in my case, I was, 46 thinking, "Oh, it's too late."

Brian Lehrer: Mo Rocca with us, with his new book, Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs. Listeners, do you consider yourself a roctogenarian now that you know what the word means? Have your autumn years been your best years? Did you wait till retirement from one career to chase a dream? Did it work out? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or maybe you've gradually built up to your greatest accomplishments later in your life, even if it's in a field that you had been in for a long time.

Whatever makes you a roctogenarian, call in and tell your story or ask Mo Rocca a question. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. I'm curious if roctogenarians need to only be people who started something new later in life. I'm looking at some of the examples in the book. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the country's most famous architects designed the Guggenheim when he was--

Mo Rocca: At 80.

Brian Lehrer: At 80, thank you.

Mo Rocca: At 84, he submitted his first design for it. This was towards the end of his life. He died right before it opened. A lot of artists protested what he was doing. They said it wasn't functional. 1.3 million visitors a year would disagree. It's a great icon, of course, of New York in the museum world. Estelle Getty is another great New York example. This is a woman who from very early in life wanted to act.

She married at 23, had two sons, was living in Queens, doing every bit of theater she could off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, off-off-off-Broadway. When her sons went off to college, then she was able to resume this pursuit full-time. She met Harvey Fierstein. She asked him to write a part in a play for her. She ended up in Torch Song Trilogy. At the age of 62, she made her national television debut in The Golden Girls.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Some others, the Artist Henri Matisse, the Screenwriter Norman Lear. Were they both-- They didn't start late in life, right?

Mo Rocca: They did not. Matisse, really, I think is an exemplar of this idea of loss into gain, that endings are beginnings. He was already a great established artist, but in his 70s, cancer robbed him of the ability to paint. He was confined to a wheelchair or to a bed. Instead of just giving up, he traded his paintbrush for a giant pair of scissors and began his celebrated brilliant period of paper cutouts. If you go to MoMA, of course, you can see the swimming pool and other examples of this.

Part of what I love about this story it was a return for him to a childlike state because the paper cutouts represent a fascination with bright colors and big shapes. I think that's the case in a lot of these stories. Matisse himself called it a second life that he was enjoying.

Brian Lehrer: Gregory in Harlem, you're on WNYC with Mo Rocca. Hi, Gregory.

Gregory: Hi, Brian. Long time, all the time. Hey, listen, man, I am 78 years old. About 18 years ago, I was told I was a writer and producer, copywriter, all of those things in the advertising world, and people kept telling me I'm too old to be creative. About six years ago, I started my fashion design company and I make awesome bow ties. I just love the fact that I can prove for myself that I am no longer a septuagenarian. I am a roctogenarian.

Mo Rocca: Oh, my God, Greg. This is great.

Gregory: I rock that. Thank you so much, Mo and Brian. I'm going to continue. This is great.

Mo Rocca: Can I just say--

Gregory: [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Mo. Talk to Gregory [crosstalk].

Mo Rocca: Greg, this is fantastic, but let me just say quickly, first of all, I bet you rock the bow ties. I should say that I do too. I tie my own bow tie. Might I also add 78, it's also the age of Samuel Whittemore who fought on the very first day of the American Revolution in the battles of Lexington and Concord. He had his face blown off. He was stabbed in the head by a red coat, and he kept fighting. That's the spirit we all need.

Brian Lehrer: Gregory-

Gregory: Thank you very much, Mo.

Brian Lehrer: -keep it alive.

Mo Rocca: Thank you, Gregory.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks.

Gregory: Hey, listen. Can I give you my address? I'll send you a bow tie, man. I have the greatest bow ties on the planet.

Brian Lehrer: We'll take his mailing address off the air.

Mo Rocca: We'll give that out later. Thanks, Gregory. I love that.

Brian Lehrer: Hang on, Gregory. We'll take it off the air, Mo.

Mo Rocca: I love a Paisley. Paisley is really great too.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Diana in Chatham, New Jersey, our second call from Chatham Today. You're on WNYC. Hi, Diana.

Mo Rocca: I'm hot in Chatham.

Diana: Oh, hello. Thank you so much, Brian, and thank you Mo. I love Mo and all his work, including Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!.

Mo Rocca: Thank you, Diana.

Diana: I got super lucky at the age of 63 when my horrible boss merged the small accounting firm I was managing with a bigger one, and I went back to my original career. Now, I'm so lucky at the age of 80. Yesterday, for example, I drove all the way from Chatham to Norristown, Pennsylvania to work in court, and I work as a judiciary translator.

I translate between French and English in the court system. I've been to Africa several times for the State Department as an interpreter. I'm just super lucky. I have no plans to retire, but lucky for me, I can pick and choose which work I decide to do. I just feel super lucky. Thank you, Mo, for the term. I love it. I'm definitely a roctogenarian. Thank you.

Mo Rocca: You are a globe-trotting roctogenarian, Diana. This is so exciting.

Diana: Indeed.

Mo Rocca: You are living your life. I don't think you're lucky. I think you made your own luck, but this was your doing. Can I say when you mentioned Africa, I'm thinking of Jane Goodall who is in the book, and she's a great roctogenarian. Diana, just the very name Diana Nyad who tried to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 28. It didn't work out. Thirty years later, she tried again and again and again and succeeded at 64.

Brian Lehrer: And that great movie last year.

Diana: She is such a wonderful role model, and she is my role model. Starting next week when the open-air pools, I'll be swimming our long laps-

Mo Rocca: Wow.

Diana: -every weekday [chuckles] because in the winter, I swim indoors at the YMCA and Summit. I thank you for the idea that we make our own luck. I believe that. Yes, you're right.

Brian Lehrer: We're starting a whole new identity group here, Mo, roctogenarians.

Mo Rocca: Can I just say that Diana is a young 80 which makes her 10 years younger than Mr. Pickles, the Houston Zoo tortoise who became a first-time father at 90 because we do include personal milestones as well.

Brian Lehrer: T in Williamsburg, you're on WNYC. Hi, T.

Mo Rocca: T?

Brian Lehrer: T, do we have you? You may have to turn down your radio if you're hearing us on delay and you don't know we've gotten to you yet. All right. We'll try T again in a minute. Bob in Bay Ridge, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bob.

Bob: Hey, guys. Good morning. It was a fascinating interview and I loved the term roctogenarian. I can totally relate because I played music as a kid, and then I had my time to go to college and have my career and I got married and bought a house and everything, and I didn't start playing music again seriously until I was in my 50s. Now, I have a rock band at the age of 63. We're finally achieving some success. We're getting paid gigs. We're well known in the scene.

We hang out at punk rock clubs all the time. I'm living a lifestyle that I only fantasized about as a kid and thought I would never achieve. I'm just shocked in my old age, I guess you would call it at 63, I'm close to retirement age, and I'm living the life that I fantasized about as a teenager and still have my career and still have my family and still have my mortgage to pay and all that stuff. I'm doing both.

Mo Rocca: Bob, I just have two things to say. Number one, my father took up the trumpet when he was close to 50. Then he played in Dixieland Jazz Band for the rest of his life. I think it was so-

Bob: Wow.

Mo Rocca: -artistically fulfilling. Don't fantasize about it, just do it. Can I also say that-

Bob: Just do it.

Mo Rocca: -in the book is Ruth Slenczynska, who was one of the world's great child prodigies, a pianist. She was the Shirley Temple of classical music, but she had a harrowing childhood. She is now in her 90s. She's now 99 and she returned to playing. She told me when I interviewed her on CBS, she said, "You don't become a real musician until after the age of 60." Which I thought was so fascinating.

Bob: [laughs]

Mo Rocca: She said the notes are the same, but the stories are different. Also, I should point out that Brian May, the great guitarist for the band Queen-

Bob: Oh, yes.

Mo Rocca: -is the reverse of your story in a sense. He was studying astrophysics and then, of course, went off and became a very different kind of shooting star, became a Hall of Fame guitarist-

Bob: Of course.

Mo Rocca: -and then went back to school and earned his PhD in astrophysics at the age of 60.

Brian Lehrer: Fascinating.

Bob: I follow his story very closely. My daughter's a big fan of astrophysics, so between Brian May and myself, she gets both of her interests ameliorated.

Brian Lehrer: Bob in Bay Ridge at 63, now in a rock band, a roctogenarian rocker. Bob, thank you very much. You know what's interesting to me about the artists, this has always been interesting to me. Some musicians or other artists, they burst upon the scene maybe in their 20s and they do their best work then, and then they repeat themselves over and over again or even become explicitly nostalgia acts. Other people develop and develop and develop.

Miles Davis from the jazz world just kept changing and growing. Beethoven I think is an example. I think people would say his ninth symphony, which was his last, was at a whole other level from his first symphony, not that his first symphony wasn't wonderful. Some artists of whatever genre develop that way. A lot do their creative work when they're young and then they don't grow with age. Have you looked at that dynamic?

Mo Rocca: Well, part of it in this section of the book called Loss and Gain is how endings can be beginnings. I'm not saying that to grow you need to lose something, but it does seem that it can be unexpectedly, I guess there's no other word for it, helpful. Borges, the great Argentinian writer, really wrote short stories, fictiones, and then as he lost his sight in his 50s and 60s and then became blind, that's when he turned to poetry because he could compose verse in his head. It opened up a whole new world and a whole new chapter of his creative life.

I suppose a lot of it is just about pushing through against these challenges and limitations and finding whole new worlds. Look, I love Nostalgia Axe, and there's one particular singer and I won't name him because it will sound like I'm knocking him, but for 30 years he's been doing the same songs over and over again. I saw him in concert at Madison Square Garden. I'm not talking about Billy Joel, who's amazing. Of course, I have special admiration for the people who keep changing.

Brian Lehrer: Since you cited the author, I don't know, I'm just thinking this thought now for the first time, maybe there's something about writing where experience leads you to better and deeper work over time that's different from music, let's say.

Mo Rocca: I think that may be the case. In the visual arts, Matisse also talked about a lack of complicatedness in his work at the end and sort of a return to a kind of simplicity. I think with the writers in the book, we include Frank McCourt, the great Frank McCourt, who for all of his life doubted that his story was worth telling, which I find to be one of the saddest things. They don't have to be famous, obviously. When any person thinks that their story is not worth telling. Frank McCourt ultimately decided that it would kill him if he didn't get this story out.

He finally said, "It took two years in all of my life to write my memoir, Angela's Ashes," which was published when he was 66 and was a literary sensation. Laura Ingalls Wilder, also the first of her eight Little House books, was published when she was 65. Her childhood was one of extreme poverty. Her daughter, who herself was a controversial figure and deserves her own chronicle, but her daughter gave her great advice, which is she said to her mother, "Write as if you're writing just for yourself, as if it's a diary." I can't think of better advice.

Brian Lehrer: We're running out of time, but I want to give T in Williamsburg--

Mo Rocca: No, we're not. That's the point, Brian. We're not running out of time. We've got lots of time.

Brian Lehrer: I missed the entire premise of this segment. T in Williamsburg, we're going to give you another shot here. You're there?

T: Hi, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. How are you?

T: What a milestone to speak with you. Hi. I am 52, and I am currently in the New York City Parks and Rec lifeguard training program, which is insane, but I can't believe I'm doing it. [laughs] It's pretty good.

Mo Rocca: You're the Diana Nyad of lifeguards.

T: [laughs] I did watch that recently. It was inspiring. I'm pretty sure I'm the oldest person in the program. I haven't asked and I don't think anyone really knows how old I am other than maybe the instructors, but I don't think my fellow classmates who are in their teens have any idea that I could be their mom or grandma. I'm doing it. It's happening and I still have four more classes and a CPR course. Then I have to take a bunch of tests to see if I pass.

Brian Lehrer: Why lifeguarding for you at your age?

T: I swim a lot. I'm an avid swimmer and a bunch of lifeguards that I became friendly with at a pool I swim at in the summer asked me, "Why don't you try doing this?" I signed up online, and I didn't think I would actually do it. You have to do a qualifying test and an eye test. I'm like, "There's no way I'm going to pass either of those," but I somehow did. I just kept passing each thing. Then the next thing I knew I was in the course and I was like, it's been a whirlwind and very humbling, very exhilarating, but humbling mostly. [laughs]

Mo Rocca: Listen, but T, I just have to remind you that Snowman, otherwise known as a Cinderella horse, the great show jumper was horse of the year at age 11, which is like 500 in human years.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles]

T: What a milestone. I love that. This is a great episode of your show. I'm really inspired. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: T, thank you very much.

Mo Rocca: Thanks, T.

Brian Lehrer: If I'm ever drowning off the Rockaways, I want you to save me because it sounds like you really-

T: Oh. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: -care and you're going to be really good at it.

Mo Rocca: Really.

Brian Lehrer: T, thank you very much. There we're going to have to leave it with Mo Rocca, whose latest book is called Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs. Another triumph for you. Mo, thank you very much for sharing it with us.

Mo Rocca: Thank you, Brian. Remember, I'm a fan of yours at every stage of life.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Thank you and ditto. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, more in a minute.

 

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