COLORADO SPRINGS – The year 1913 saw the birth of parcel post, personal income tax and zippers – and Beatrice Risinger, Alice Smart and Claribel Conway.
The three residents of a senior living campus in Colorado Springs were toddlers when the United States entered World War I; 6-year-olds when women were granted the constitutional right to vote; and teens and young women embarking on new life chapters during the Great Depression.
“It is so incredible when you think about what they’ve experienced, from the horse and buggy to now. Seems like everyone I’ve worked with who gets to be this age, they just embrace change. They have to,” said Connie Johnson, general manager at The Bridge assisted living community.
Nationwide, the number of people living to age 100 has grown by more than 65 percent since 1980, thanks to 20th century advances in medicine and disease treatment, public health and nutrition.
“We’re in the business of working with older folks, and we’re so lucky to be able to do it,” said Kristi Graham, director of business development at Life Care Center, the campus’s skilled nursing facility. “To have three who are 102, at different levels of care on the same campus, is amazing to me.”
It also leads to some complicated questions about the future of care for America’s aging seniors, a group whose growth far outpaces that of any other segment of the population.
“These women retired and were able to move into a setting where they still could thrive because they still have so much activity and socialization – and they had the finances to do it,” Graham said. “It’s not cheap to stay at one of these places. If everybody starts living to 102, what’s it going to do to the system?”
Today, the only way to prepare for a long life, lived into one’s 90s and beyond, is to plan to live that long, physically and financially, Graham said. For Risinger, Smart and Conway – Scorpios who celebrate birthdays within a few weeks of one another in late October and November – the years have been good, and a gift they didn’t necessarily anticipate.
“People make such a big deal about birthdays,” Risinger said. “I don’t try to remember everything, good grief. Hard work, that’s what I remember.”
