Even tho I may look like one of these folks I am not there yet... look at the ages... notice how good they look .... AND they are still out on the job. Congrats to all of them.. I will be trying my best to follow their good example.
Enjoy your work today.... enjoy your work every day..... you could be working until you are 100
I'll take a break now and go feed the chickens ... it's a beautiful sunny day out there.
Helen Hansen, 92Office worker
Stanton, Michigan
"I was Rosie the riveter, on the center wing of the bombers," Hanson says, because she assembled B-24s during World War II.
She remembers when federal agents "with black hats" took away one of her co-workers. "They motioned for her to come down [from the airplane] and that was the last time you saw her," she says. "Come to find out that little gal was a Russian spy, and she was riveting in the places she wasn't supposed to."
Hansen later worked at a refrigerator factory, various restaurants, bars, a dry cleaner, a hotel and a thrift store. "I guess I've done just about everything," she says. "It seems like I've always been lucky getting jobs." Three years after retiring as a city clerk, the non-profit group Experience Works, which finds jobs for elderly people, placed her as an office worker for the Michigan Department of Human Services. "I've got to keep going," she says. "I don't want to retire."
Photo: Courtesy of Michigan Dept. of Human Services
Tao Porchon-Lynch, 91Yoga instructor
White Plains, New York
Tao Porchon-Lynch learned yoga while growing up in India, in the former French colony of Pondicherry, but she didn't become an instructor until half a century later.
For much of her career, she danced, modeled and acted in India, France, England and California. She appeared in Hollywood movies and on television before landing a job with UniTel in the 1960s, establishing TV stations in India. "I was playing with life," she says. "There was so much to do and so little time to do it."
Porchon-Lynch has taught yoga since the 1970s and certified 400 other teachers. Until recently, she was able to suspend herself by her hands in the full-lotus and peacock positions before she broke her wrist. She's still a competitive ballroom dancer, despite undergoing hip replacement five years ago. "I'm not going to give up," Porchon-Lynch says. "I'm going to dance and do yoga for as long as I live."
Chloe Grimm, 94Office worker
Anaconda, Montana
Florence "Chloe" Grimm, former owner of a real estate agency, re-entered the work force six years ago after 17 years of retirement. "I didn't want that rocking chair to get me," she says. Experience Works placed her in a part-time office job at the Montana Department of Health and Human Services, partly to supplement her social security checks.
Grimm admits that it's not always easy to get up for work, though it pays off. "There are days when that alarm goes off I could throw it out the window," she says. "But when I get up and dressed and ready to go, I feel pretty good. Maybe I'm crazy or something, but I do like coming to work. I'll probably continue working until my health fails, until I have to quit."
She spends most of her free time playing golf or performing with a lip sync group called the Strikettes.
Photo: Courtesy of Montana Health and Human Services
Jack Borden, 101Attorney
Weatherton, Texas
Jack Borden was born on a Texas farm that's now at the bottom of a man-made lake. He grew up in a log cabin without electricity and started working corn and cotton fields when he was five. At age 11, he was leading a horse-drawn grain binder to cut wheat.
Borden has been a lawyer since 1936 and continues to work full-time at his firm. He was also a mayor, a district attorney and an FBI agent. He continues to chew tobacco, a lifelong vice. "I've got a mouthful now," he noted during a recent interview. He keeps an antique spittoon by his desk and has more of them piled in the corner of his office. Borden says he "never worried about dying" and has no plans to call it quits.
"When the gals come into the office and I've got my head down on the desk, and I ain't moving, then that's when I'll retire," he says.
Photo: Rose Page
Mildred Heath, 102Reporter
Overton, Nebraska
Mildred Heath started working at her hometown newspaper when she was 15, toiling over a hot-metal linotype machine with her boyfriend. She married him a few years later in 1929, and they co-founded a business that eventually expanded to three papers.
She has since passed that business on to her three children, though she outlived them all, as well as her husband. The business was recently sold, but she still reports for one of those papers, the Beacon-Observer.
"If I get news, I turn it in," Heath says, commuting the short distance to her office in an electric wheelchair. Two years ago, when she was a spry 100, Experience Works awarded her the title of "America's Oldest Worker." She says that being a centenarian journalist has one drawback when it comes to sources: "The people I knew are all dead."
Photo: Allen Krohn
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