SALON

Ed Kashi

Tuesday, Dec 9, 2003 11:12 PM UTC

What it means to be old

An extraordinary new book of photographs captures the diversity of America's elderly -- the giddy newlyweds, ballroom dancers, road-trippers, as well as the neglected and infirm.

By and

A shriveled man wearing running shorts and sneakers gracefully pole-vaults at the Senior Olympics. A 58-year-old woman in a thong spreads her legs in a wide split at the Miss Exotic World pageant. An elderly veteran, who suffers from arthritis, high blood pressure, and the aftereffects of a stroke, stands in his kitchen while his son swaddles him in a diaper. These are just a few of the bold, unflinching images in “Aging in America: The Years Ahead,” a new book by photographer Ed Kashi and writer/producer Julie Winokur.

By mid-century there will be more Americans over 55 than under 18 — a startling demographic shift that will have huge social, economic and cultural implications. With this in mind, Kashi and Winokur spent seven years traveling across the United States recording the stories and pictures of a segment of society that is often invisible: the aged. “We wanted to dispel myths about growing old,” says Winokur. “Because too often the elderly are portrayed as caricatures rather than complex individuals.”

Loners of America

“I believe we are the ‘I’ generation,” says Yvonne Gardner, 69. She is on her way to an RV rally with the Loners of America, a club for single seniors. The Loners have three rules: you must love to travel, you must have some type of RV and you must be avowedly single. According to the bylaws, anyone who displays “coupling behavior” is out of the club.

“Most all of us got married relatively young,” says Yvonne. “Then we had the children, so we always had to be giving and attentive to them. Then the children moved out and when we lost our mate, all of a sudden, we’re all alone and it’s the first time in our lives that we’ve ever been able to just think about us. I don’t have to tell anybody what time I’m going to get up. If I want spaghetti for breakfast, I can have spaghetti for breakfast … with garlic in it,” explains Gardner.

As Gardner prepares her rig for a long day on the road, she says, “I still feel 45 or 50 or something. I haven’t reached ‘old.’ I guess old to me is infirmity, when you can’t do things and anywhere in between is not really old, it’s aging or something like that.”

Ricky and Gerald Gross

After losing their mates, Ricky Caminetti and Gerald Gross discovered that it’s never too late to fall in love. “When we went down to get our license, they couldn’t believe that a 1914 was marrying a 1918,” says Gerald. “I lost my wife a year ago. I called Ricky and asked her if she’d like to have dinner. We had dinner. And two weeks later, I was engaged.”

“He didn’t ask me,” adds Ricky.

“I didn’t ask her, I just told her,” he says.

Ricky, a religious woman, refused to sleep with her fiancé until they married. “There’s a big spark there,” admits Gerald, three days before their wedding. “We hug, we kiss, we squeeze. We do everything …”

“Except,” she cuts him off. Gerald shrugs his shoulders.

“For nine months, I used to go to bed at night and say, ‘Why do I have to wake up in the morning?’ I didn’t care to. I didn’t want to,” says Gerald, tears welling in his eyes. “Now I go to bed and I say, ‘Give me some life, I’ve got a new life now.’ I’m 86, don’t forget. How much can I live? Five years, I’ll be lucky. I’ll pray for five years. But now I’ve got someone to do it with.”

Frankie Manning

“I have a hip replacement. I have a prostate removed. But I’m still moving and that’s what counts.” Manning is one of the original Lindy Hoppers from the Savoy ballroom in Harlem, and at the age of 89 he still teaches sold-out workshops all over the world. “I don’t actually think about what I can do or what I don’t do. I just do what I can and enjoy life.”

Frankie danced in the reviews of Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and all the greats of the jazz and bebop era. He has lived long enough to see his art form go in and out of style several times. A whole new crop of devotees attend his birthday celebration every year, where he dances with as many women as his age. He often dances with two women at a time to meet his quota.

“I feel great that I am able to move around as well as I do at this age. I went to a senior citizens’ center and gave a little show. I asked some of them to get up and do the shim-sham, which is a very simple dance. They were saying ‘Oh no, I’m too old to do that,’ and I started asking, ‘Well, how old are you?’ Somebody said, ‘Oh, I’m 75,’ and “Oh, I’m 72,’ ‘Oh, I’m 80.’ I said, you know how old I am? I’m 89 years old. So don’t tell me that. Get on up!”

Virginia and John Magrath

“Though I didn’t see him fall, I heard it and it was a terrible sound,” says Virginia Magrath about her husband, John’s, recent accident. “He fell backwards against the bathtub and hit the back of his head. That was the worst night in my life.”

A blood clot formed in John’s brain and aggressive surgery did nothing to alleviate the problem. Virginia sat vigil by John’s side night and day in the hospital for three weeks. She dealt with doctors and nurses around the clock and faced a lot of frustration trying to advocate for her husband. “Doctors ignore you entirely if you’re old and there’s somebody younger around. Like they would talk to my daughters, and they wouldn’t look at me, they wouldn’t direct anything they said to me. And I have said, on more than one occasion, ‘I am his wife. Talk to me.’ And they do, then.”

Falls are the fifth leading cause of death for older adults, and after a grueling three weeks it became apparent that John would not get better. “John was blind and he had dementia. He had nothing to live for, no good life ahead of him,” explains Virginia. “It seemed that was the point when we should let nature take its course.”

Monday, Apr 22, 1996 5:51 PM UTC

Backfire

Phoning from Beirut, photojournalist Ed Kashi tells how Israel's "surgical strike" against Hezbollah is playing into the hands of the enemy it vowed to destroy

By

Every day since the Israeli offensive against Lebanon began, Hezbollah fund-raisers drive up and down Hamra Street, the chic commercial center of West Beirut. Patriotic songs blare from the loudspeakers atop their flag-bedecked Mercedes Benzes. Passers-by, not just the veiled, bearded Shiite Muslims, but Greek Orthodox, Maronite Christian, tonily dressed cosmopolitans, unhesitatingly empty their pockets into the Hezbollah collection boxes. More money for more Katyusha rockets to rain down on northern Israel.

At a Hezbollah cemetery in a poorer Beirut neighborhood, a 17-year-old girl, the victim of Israeli helicopter gunship fire, is buried to the accompaniment of screams and curses from the living hurled against Israel and the United States. On day five of the assault, my Hezbollah guide tells me not to come around any more. “It’s not safe here because you’re an American,” he says.

A Lebanese employee of Motorola tells me that all the imported executives at a plant here have been sent home. Once again, it is not safe to do business in Beirut. Israeli helicopters knocked out a power relay station and a domestic fuel depot as Lebanese anti-aircraft guns waved back and forth fruitlessly. Any hope of recovering from 17 years of war, civil and otherwise, have been set back months, maybe years.

It’ll all be OK once there is a cease-fire, the conventional wisdom goes. Syria, the country’s real lord and master, will come to its senses, and Hezbollah will cease to be an effective fighting force. Maybe Assad will be drawn into the peace process now.

Yet Israel, just as it did with its invasion of 1982, has generated so much hatred here, that such calculations seem sure to backfire. The Israeli assault appears to have done little to hamper Hezbollah’s ability to pour rockets into the Jewish state. A product of that invasion, Hezbollah has sunk roots into Lebanese society, with its schools, hospitals and other social organizations. Long regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility, by many elements of Lebanese society, it is now seen as a defender of the nation’s sovereignty against an aggressive Israeli force that controls its own “security zone” in the south (forgetting for a moment that 35,000 Syrian troops are also stationed here).

Gone is the kernel of sympathy the Lebanese may have felt for Israel in the wake of the wave of Islamic suicide bombs that killed dozens of civilian Jews. It is hard enough to get Arabs to understand how genuinely vulnerable Israel feels. Israel’s actions — at least as they appear from here — make that task virtually impossible. Rather, one wonders how many new suicide bombers, carrying the image of mutilated mothers and headless babies lying on the ground at the UN refugee center at Qana, now await their turn to wreak Allah’s vengeance on equally innocent Israelis.

We think of the Israelis as really smart. They’ve got great intelligence, and supposedly the best fighting force in the world. They want peace, God knows. Either we have given them too much credit — and the not-so surgical strike at Qana hardly fits their pinpoint image — or they have become so calloused and cynical that they just don’t care anymore. In the past, a massacre like that which occurred at Qana would have sent 100,000 Israeli protesters into the streets of Tel Aviv. Not this time.

One wants to believe that some good could come out of such a catastrophe, that it would have a clarifying effect on all parties. But 12 days into this merciless imbroglio, the guns are still blazing, the diplomats still scurrying, and the mutual distrust deepens. From here, “peace,” if it should come at all, looks to be a very cold one. As cold as the grave.



Slash and Burn

Angry enviro beats up Sierra Club, 
targets Clinton next
BY MARK HERTSGAARD
Tim Hermach is a take-no-prisoners kind of guy. Which is unusual for an environmentalist these days, the Eugene, Ore. native is quick to tell you. “Most people in this movement want things to be nicer,” he says, his lips curling in disgust, “but they don’t want to do what’s necessary to win. The worst are the mainstream environmental groups headquartered in Washington. Professional losers, I call them.”
Hermach, executive director of the Native Forest Council, a grassroots group he founded in 1988, scored a major victory Sunday when Sierra Club members, against the policy of its governing body, voted 2-1 for a “zero-cut” — absolutely no commercial logging within America’s national forests. Hermach’s proposition was endorsed by 14 state chapters, including southern California, the Sierra Club’s largest, as well as by dozens of leading activists.
“We’ve been sold out by our board of directors,” charged Hermach, “the same people who went along with (President) Clinton’s forest plan in the first place.” That 1994 accord, brokered by Clinton and endorsed by mainstream environmental groups, allowed for the continued harvesting of old-growth timber in the Pacific Northwest, even in endangered ecosystems. Hermach and other radical activists dubbed the agreement “The Deal of Shame.”
They were further enraged when Clinton signed a budget bill containing a rider authored by Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., suspending environmental laws in parts of the national forests of Washington and Oregon through 1996. Gorton said the rider would allow “salvage” logging of diseased or burned trees. The US. Forest Service estimates the bill will triple the amount of lumber extracted from ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest.

“The whole notion that somehow these forests are overflowing with diseased and dying trees that have to be cut down for the forests’ own good is a transparent scam, designed by the timber industry to justify its continuing destruction of the national heritage,” Hermach growls.
Clinton said later he had made a mistake signing the bill, and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt called it a “tragedy,” but Hermach is unforgiving. “Clinton has lied and betrayed us so many times I want him out,” says Hermach, who is supporting a new coalition, “Environmentalists To Dump Clinton,” to accomplish just that. The organization already has 2,000 members, he says.
Hermach is unpersuaded by the argument that, compared to the slash-and-burn Republicans, Clinton is the lesser of two evils.
“I think Clinton would be the worst president for environmentalists to support. Including Buchanan. Environmentalists did OK during 12 years of Reagan and Bush. And we did OK because we had to fight.”




Now We Are Gone
Christopher Robin Milne, bookshop owner and the model for Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh’s companion in his father’s famous children’s books, died on April 20, aged 75.
The following excerpt is reprinted from the 

The Times  of London’s elegant obituary.

“Diffident and thoughtful in character, with a gentle nature and a precise love of words, Christopher Milne would become as gloomy as the moth-eaten old donkey Eeyore when the subject of his father’s books was broached. His father (A.A. Milne), he said, had climbed on his 

infant shoulders and filched his good name. “One day I will write verses about him and see how he likes it,” he once declared.
Christopher Robin Milne was born in Chelsea, in a genteel street of bay-windowed cottages where fuchsias and geraniums flourished in fastidious front gardens. His father, despite the affability which his children’s books suggest, was distant, though amiable, with his one and only son. Warm, but with a thin lip and ice-cold eye, “his heart remained buttoned up all through his life,” Christopher Milne later wrote. As a young boy he passed most of his time with his nanny in a nursery on the top floor of the house. He was taken formally downstairs three times a day to visit his parents: in the morning, when breakfast was nearly over, after  tea, when he could scramble around on the drawing room ottoman, and in the evening shortly  before he went to bed.”






Quotes of the day 


“Standing around together naked? Oh no, man — people would feel really uncomfortable about that.” (Andre Henning, 18, senior at McHenry High School, West Dundee, Ill.)


“You just cake on the deodorant and hope you’re not going to smell too bad.” 
(C.J. Glawe, 16, sophomore, McHenry High)

– from “Students Sweat, They Just Don’t Shower,”   New York Times  story about the new reluctance of American kids to shower after P.E.)

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                        Saturday, Dec 2, 1995 4:49 PM UTC                    

                    
Jewish settlers

					
Photojournalist Ed Kashi captures the defiance of the West Bank's Jewish settlers

					
					By 
                        
    
                    			

                    
					
As the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has shown, militant Jewish settlers in the West Bank present a formidable obstacle to the country’s quest for peace with the Palestinians. While Hamas and other Arab terrorist groups wage war on the peace process from without, a group of extremist Jewish settlers, unmoved by their government’s policies or public sentiment, are waging war within.
Over the past two years I have been documenting the lives of these settlers. Passionately motivated by the ideology of Zionism, they view themselves as ordained by God and the Torah to reclaim ancient land, which they refer to not as the West Bank but by its biblical names: Judea and Sumaria. Yeshiva students here take self-defense as seriously as Torah studies. A simple trip to nearby baths or vineyards is an armed excursion. Mobile homes are crane-lifted into place in defiance of Israeli law. These settlers will not willingly move off the land and let their dream of a “greater” Israel be destroyed.
I started the project in 1994, documenting the daily lives of two communities: the militant Jewish enclave in the center of the Arab city of Hebron, and the small settlement of Bat Ayin, a lone hilltop community five miles from Bethlehem. I plan to return to the West Bank at least twice a year for the next few years to record the settlers’ reactions as the West Bank is relinquished to the Palestinians. No matter where the peace process leads, the “true believers” of the West Bank will remain a community with a powerful story to be documented.
This project also examines the broader question of identity. Like the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, or the factions in Bosnia, the Jewish settlers define themselves by their enemies, or who they are not. Fear of extinction makes them prisoners of their own history.
–Ed Kashi
The settlers believe in having big families. Here, friends and relatives of a Hebron Yeshiva student dance at his wedding celebration.




After prayers, the Anosh family in Bat Ayin sits down to dinner.  Typically, this small community stays in radio and beeper contact with one another, out of fear of nighttime Arab attacks.




Guns are never far away from the settlers, including these students at the Hebron Yeshiva, adjacent to the Cave of the Patriarchs.


Ed Kashi is one of America’s leading photojournalists.  His work appears regularly in the National Geographic, Newsweek, the London Independent Magazine and other major magazines in the United States and Europe.  His National Geographic cover story on the Kurds became a book, “When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds,” published by Pantheon in 1994.  Recent magazine spreads include a portrait of the African continent for Vanity Fair and one of California strawberry field workers for The Atlantic. 





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