Turning forty in old-time Phoenix


When I turned sixty, a year ago, many people told me that it's the new forty! This was meant to be a positive statement, and make me feel not quite so ancient, but to me it just meant that many people have no idea what the old forty was.

And comparing 60 to 40 back in the day really is a fair comparison. As a healthy man I can expect another thirty to forty years of life, and possibly more. My old body can't do the same things it did twenty or thirty years ago, when I was in my prime, but that's what being 60, or 40 is all about.

If you're better at math than me, you have been adding and subtracting not only from my age, but also from 40. A healthy man like me in old-time Phoenix could expect to live into his 80s, assuming of course that he isn't kicked by a mule, or run over by the trolley car! And, unlike today, a man would be considered an adult when he was full-grown, which for me was 15, and for some men even younger. I've done enough research on genealogy to realize that people routinely became grandparents in their thirties and forties. Nowadays we think of grandparents as being my age, 60s - you know, the new forty!

At age 15 I was really still a child, and even at 18 I really wasn't mature enough to settle down and start a family. If I had been, I would have expected a grandchild by the time I was about forty, no later than fifty. Yes, of course some people do that, but nowadays it's rare, not common.


Nowadays 50 really doesn't sound all that old, but it's the age that you were required to be in order to move into Sun City when it began in the 1960s. The thought of moving into a retirement community at age 49 and twelve months (if you follow me here) just kinda blows my mind. That's a view into what old age was back then!

By the way, my favorite fictional character, created by Ian Fleming in the early 1950s, was a spy who was obliged to take forced retirement from his "00" status when he reached the age of forty. I've found it interesting that most of the actors who have portrayed him have done so into their forties and fifties, retiring at about sixty (the new forty!).

So, after pondering this, I'm happy to be at the new forty. I realize that I'm no longer young, and that it's time for me to step aside from many things and let the new generation take over. Nowadays you only have to be 55 to move to Sun City, but most of the people I see there when I visit are WAY older than that, which presumably makes 80 the new 60.

Image at the top of this post: Me at the Satisfied Frog in 1997, Cave Creek, Arizona, right before I turned forty.
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