My wife and I laughed our way through Danny Gold’s great 2017 documentary, “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast,” the other night and the theories about growing old espoused by Carl Reiner, Betty White, and Tony Bennett reminded me of Barbara Folk and Marge Callahan.
I will never meet Carl Reiner, Betty White, or Tony Bennett (sometimes I pretend to sing like Tony Bennett), but Barbara and Marge are my friends and they are experts at age defiance.
I am gentleman-enough to not reveal their ages. Suffice it to say, age is just an incidental number to two women who effortlessly incorporate positive attitudes, flexibility, and seemingly relentless activity into their lives with humor dominating all they say and do.
Both women were undoubtedly referred to as “good-looking dames” in their younger days and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if you told me they slapped a few overly romantic swains.
Barbara grew up on Long Island, served in World War II, and was living with one of our other close friends — the late Sally Manning — in the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport, Miss., when Katrina rushed ashore in 2005.
Navy Seabees helped Barbara, Sally and fellow veterans ride out the hurricane. When the wind and water subsided, the retirees boarded buses bound for the veterans’ retirement home in Washington, D.C.
Barbara and Sally hit the grim retirement complex with its concrete towers and dark halls like a live wire. Their humor and energy made them friends and, when Sally died, Barbara moved to Vermont to live with her daughter.
A change of scenery from the sultry South, to an urban neighborhood, to the snowy North, might have thrown some seniors off kilter. Not Barbara. Her painting skills blossomed in Vermont and, when COVID-19 hit, she started making masks with the energy and determination of a riveter assembling a B-17 Flying Fortress 80 years ago.
The easiest way to sum up Marge’s energy level is to refer to the email I got from her two weeks ago outlining her itinerary for 2022: “Going to Sarasota, Sunday River and Hilton Head. It’s my year of living dangerously.”
She taught at the Lincoln (now Lincoln-Thomson) School in Lynn for 18 years and she has an encyclopedic knowledge of the city.
“Talk about architecture, the Paramount was fabulous with a long grand foyer. As a kid I thought I was entering a palace!” she recalled in an email commenting on the Golden Age of Theaters in Lynn.
I wrote a column about West Lynn luminaries and Marge promptly regaled me with stories about Walkin’ Mike Doyle and Eddie Peabody.
“I remember that Doyle traveled with the circus and played the calliope. Eddie Peabody was a renowned banjo player…” she said.
She said there was once an ice-cream place with a miniature zoo next to Buchanan Bridge and she recalled an end-of-summer event at the former Manning Bowl where kids marched and staged performances.
If there is a secret to Barbara, Marge and aging, it is that humor and energy are the main ingredients in their lives and the past only serves to provide humorous memories. Marge summed up how she reads The Daily Item this way: “I go to the Opinion page after I make sure I’m not in the obits.”
Carl Reiner and Betty White would have loved to sit down and shoot the breeze with both of these women and Tony Bennett would have gladly crooned a few classics for them.
