At their age, ‘caring for’ each other is vital
By Joe Clark
She had seen many a day — nearly 33,000 of them — but this one was “the best.” A stroll on the Boardwalk, a walk around town, a terrific fish dinner.
And best of all, she got to “see the ocean one more time.”
And when this dreary, rainy October day was over, the 90-year-old widow turned to Art Rowe and said, “this was the best day of my life.”
Two weeks later, she died.
“She used to live by the ocean in Florida,” said Rowe, a retired Philadelphia fireman who, with his wife, Shirley, are volunteers at Keystone Hospice, in Wyndmoor. “She said all she wanted (before she died) was to see the ocean one more time.”
 So Art Rowe, who’ll be 90 next month, and Shirley, who celebrated her 86th birthday in March, drove her and a friend to Cape May for one final look at the sea.
This old-woman-and-the-sea story is just one of the many fond memories the Rowes treasure from volunteering at Keystone, an independent, non-profit in-home and residential hospice.
The Rowes volunteer two days a week, stuffing envelopes, chatting with residents, helping out at special events, “just doing whatever we ask them to do,” said Jean Francis, Keystone’s volunteer director. “We are blessed to have them. They are our goodwill ambassadors.”
The Rowes owe much of the sunshine in the autumn of their lives to Keystone. It’s where they met, where they found friendship, where they fell in love. It was a love that led to a “simple, quiet” wedding ceremony five years ago.
They met in 2002. Art’s wife of 56 years had died at Keystone four months earlier, and he had begun volunteering at the hospice. Shirley, a widow, was at a nearby rehabilitation facility recovering from a broken hip, and between rehab sessions, “for something to do,” had begun volunteering at the hospice.
His tutor’s suitor
Shirley became sort of a tutor to Art. Soon, he became his tutor’s suitor. “He’d pick me up in the morning and take me home in the afternoon,” said Shirley, who has one son. “We got very close. We got to holding hands. One thing led to another. That’s how it happened.”
“We were both alone,” said Art, who has no children. “We enjoyed each other’s company.”
So one day Shirley (yes, Shirley) proposed. “We were always together,” smiled Shirley “I said why don’t we see if we can make it for good.”
‘Didn’t want a fuss’
They made it “for good” on March 17, 2003, in Art’s Fox Chase apartment. Before just two witnesses and a chaplain from the hospice, they exchanged vows.
“We were very quiet about it,” said Shirley. “It was very simple. We didn’t want to make a fuss.”
“We’re very happy,” said Art. “We’re company for each other.”
Added Shirley: “When you reach our age, nothing is more important than to have someone care for you, and for you to care for them.
“We’re a very lucky couple.”
By Elaine Welles
“Use it or lose it” applies to all your muscles, including those in the brain.
In addition to physical exercises designed to keep them healthy, many seniors are exercising their brains in the classroom as well. Life-long learning classes are held in churches, senior centers and community colleges.
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Temple University (OLLI), formerly known as TARP (Temple Association for Retired Persons), has been offering education to seniors for 33 years
The TARP program began in 1975. Recently, Temple University received a $100,000 grant from the Bernard Osher Foundation, and TARP — renamed for Osher — was accepted into the national network of Lifelong Learning Institutes.
OLLI has 700 members (TARP began with 85). Membership is required of instructors, as well as students. For $240 per year, you may attend classes of your choice for two semesters and an abbreviated summer semester. You also may audit one regular Temple class, with the professor’s approval.
OLLI class offerings for the fall semester, which begins next month, will include upwards of 70 courses on subjects such as current events, science, play reading, philosophy and religion. All classes are at Temple University Center City, 1515 Market St.
 The Friday Forum, featuring outside speakers, is open to the public, says Harry Segal, president of TARP for the past two years (a new president of OLLI will be elected next month).
Segal, a retired lawyer, joined the organization because it was “a perfect place for me to be active,” he says, “and now I love it.” There is no homework, no attendance requirements and no written assignments. If you join, Segal says, do so “for the joy of learning.”
The atmosphere of the classroom is relaxed, with each lecture self-contained. Instructors, some with doctorate degrees, offer course selections and credentials to an education committee that determines suitability of the course based on participant interest and the instructor’s qualifications.
Segal has been leading a class in the summer session called “Another Opening, Another Show,” in which theater and film were analyzed.
While the original name of the organization suggested that the program was open primarily to retired persons, anyone may join OLLI. Most members, says Segal, are between 55 and 85, although one was 98.
Peg Walsh-McKenna says she “dreaded the word ‘retire.’” But, after she did “retire” from United Way eight years ago, she joined TARP and is now its spokesperson, also teaching “Poetry Writers’ Workshop.”
OLLI will continue to offer the special “guest pass” that TARP initiated for would-be members. Entitling a visitor to one morning and one afternoon class, it is available at the OLLI office, 1515 Market St. (215-204-1505).
Learning can be fun, and it need not be missing from your life. New members registration is scheduled for Sept. 3 and 4, from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
By Finy Hansen
 Gertrude Greene’s family threw a 90th birthday party for her at Galdo’s Catering and Entertainment in South Philadelphia — full-course dinner, DJ, the works.
More than 100 people were there, and greetings came from all over, including from President and Mrs. George W. Bush (a note now framed on her wall at home). She danced the night away, looking elegant as always.
Next morning, she resumed her busy activities, just as she has for the three-quarters of a century since her mother died, leaving the teenager as woman of the house.
Old cookbook on the shelf
Her day might include line dancing or pinochle at Philadelphia Senior Center on South Broad Street, or baking a birthday cake for someone in her family, and, since she lives alone, planning meals and shopping for them, taking care of her house, watering her plants.
“I haven’t the energy I used to,” she confesses. “Now I vacuum one floor a day, the other the next. Some days, I feel like I’m 40; some days, like I’m 90!”
After her mother died, there were just Gertrude (youngest of 14 children) and her dad, a retired maintenance worker, in the house.
Once, her dad asked her to bake an apple pie. “I don’t know how,” she said. “Well, you can read, can’t you?” he asked. He bought a cookbook and she made the pie. Seven years later, he too would be gone, and at 21, she’d be on her own. The cookbook is still on her shelf — a treasured memento, its frayed cover lovingly taped: The Pictorial Review Cookbook, 1934 Edition.
When her mother died, Gertrude Brooks was in her first year at William Penn High School, then at 15th and Green Sts. Only one of her siblings had completed high school, and her father told her, “Girls don’t need high school. They just need to get married.”
But Gertrude was determined and graduated with honors. Then the nuns at St. Peter Claver — a South Philly grade school dedicated to the education of African-American children, which she had attended — asked her to teach 3rd and 4th grade (you didn’t need a college degree then for the lower grades). She taught for six years, while taking courses at St. Joseph’s University.
Then she met and married Alex Greene, a Georgian who grew up on a farm and worked for the railroad. Gertrude stopped teaching. In World War II, Alex was drafted, and every month, sent her a war bond. When he came home, she spread the bonds on the dining room table. “That’s how we bought our house on South 24th Street,” she says.
The Greenes raised eight children in that house. One went in the service and seven went to college. Her three oldest great-grandchildren are college graduates, and another is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.
Bored by retirement
During 25 years as a stay-at-home mom, she volunteered at her children’s school and her church, St. Anthony, which was at 25th St. and Grays Ave. (now, her church is St. Gabriel’s, 29th and Dickinson Sts.), made the children’s clothes, took classes, sang in a church choir, and sewed and crocheted altar cloths for use during mass. She sold handkerchiefs and doilies at consignment shops, and cushions, baby sacks and blankets that she made from facecloths.
After the last child graduated from 8th grade, she took a part-time job at Strawbridge & Clothier. Ten years later, Alex retired, so she did too. But after a month at home, she was bored. So she got a part-time job at Wanamaker’s and stayed until she was 70.
Seven days after their 60th wedding anniversary, Alex died. A widow at 84, she was not ready to slow down. At Philadelphia Senior Center, where she had been volunteering, she took courses in photography and cake decorating. She won prizes for knitting, sewing and crocheting. In 2008 she received the Center’s “Volunteer Excellence Award.”
Gertrude Greene still line dances a few times a week, but no longer carries heavy lunch trays at Philadelphia Senior Center. “My balance is better for dancing than for walking,” she explains. She plays pinochle regularly, but has cut back on baking and handcrafts — only an occasional afghan or matched set of booties and cap for a new great-grandchild, or a special birthday cake.
By Bill Kent
Paul Fierlinger, 73, has been waking as early as 2 a.m. so he can be at the computer in the living room of his Wynnewood house, sometimes before the coffee is made.
He hopes, after a long day, for 10 seconds of good work.
Those seconds add up. He’s currently rushing to finish My Dog Tulip, an animated film based on the 1956 memoir of British author J.R. Ackerley and his German shepherd Tulip. Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini have contributed voices to the film, which is about five minutes from being finished.
 Fierlinger and his wife Sandra began the film three years ago, after their PBS animated special, Still Life With Dogs, won several awards here and abroad.
“Out of the blue, I got a call from a producer who said he loved what we had done with dogs, and do I have anything else with dogs in it?” Paul recalls.
Paul, who is self-taught, and Sandra, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, work slowly. Paul does the sketching and animation with pen on electronic pad; Sandra adds color and backgrounds.
The images appear on large flat-screen monitors in the living room. When Paul runs the images in series, he can see if the movements are just right for the scene he’s creating. If they’re a little too fast or slow, he’ll start over again.
“On a good day, we’ll have done about 10 seconds of animation,” Paul says. On some days, nothing seems to work right. “We persevere,” Paul says. “We’ve learned to enjoy the process.”
Born in Japan to Czechoslovakian diplomats, Paul Fierlanger counts among his influences Disney’s Pinocchio, as well as the deceptively simple illustrations of humorist James Thurber. He did his first animation — a series of sketches on notebook paper — at age 16, while attending a boarding school. After creating some 200 animated films in Czechoslovakia, he fled government persecution, escaping to Holland, then France and finally the United States. After working briefly for Universal Pictures, he settled in Philadelphia in 1969 and began producing animated features.
In their studio, relocated in 1979 from Philadelphia to Wynnewood, Paul and Sandra have written, directed, illustrated and occasionally provided voices for 500 commercials (their Comcast and Philadelphia Veterans Services commercials air daily), short features for children (Sesame Street’s Teeny Little Super Guy was shot in their living room and kitchen) and longer features for adult audiences: And Then I’ll Stop, about addiction; animation for Maggie Growls, a tribute to Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn; and Drawn From Memory, an autobiographical film commissioned by PBS. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and his work has been nominated for an Oscar and has won two Peabody awards for excellence in broadcast journalism, among many other awards.
Twenty years ago, when they began producing films for PBS, the Fierlingers employed as many as seven people. Now the studio consists of two computers, each the size of a small suitcase.
Their next feature will be about Joshua Slocum, the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone in a sailboat. Paul expects it to take three years, at the rate of about 10 seconds a day.
 In her 70s, she’s
still an athlete, as
well as a scholar
By Ann L. Rappoport
Few gray-haired 76-year-olds can turn heads as they sweat their way through Bally’s Total Fitness gym. But “Wow, you look good, Babe!” is just one of the most recent remarks young men sling at Judith Loeb Leifer.
The scholar-athlete’s rigorous exercise routine comes at the end of the day, after her full-time job as library technician at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania Library System. Fluent in several languages, this Phi Beta Kappa (Temple, 1980) in European history brings invaluable skills to an invaluable collection. Researchers seek her out when they need resources nobody else can find.
Leifer’s personal story, unique as it is, reflects the story of a larger Jewish community. The granddaughter of two rabbis, Judith Loeb grew up in Bratislava’s ghetto during the Slovak alliance with Nazi Germany. “I was the little girl bringing food and Red Cross aerograms to neighbors, provided they were still there,” she says.
From Budapest to Palestine
Deprived of schooling, the 10-year-old often removed her yellow star to sneak out of the ghetto to a private library in the city. There, she devoured Uncle Tom’s Cabin and works by Dostoevsky, Balzac, Maupassant and Voltaire, among others.
One grandparent lived, another died, in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. Arriving in Palestine on one of the last transports out of Budapest, Hungary, before Hungarian Jews were deported to concentration camps, she slept on straw in a house short of amenities in an orange orchard in Palestine.
‘Survival on the brink’
She was part of the birth of modern Israel. Her brother was shot through the face by Arabs in Israel’s War for Independence. She was in the paramilitary at 16, in the Israeli army at 18. She became an officer, in charge of supplies for an entire regiment.
“Our very survival was questionable,” she recalls. “We were on the brink. We had to make do with as little as possible [but] we had a purpose.
“We were idealists.”
Later, she worked for the Israeli government tourist office. Among notables she greeted with flowers at the airport was Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
She thrived on beach sports and still swims regularly.
After army days, she followed a friend to England, where she became a registered nurse. She met Calvin Leifer, her future husband, during a trip to New Haven, Conn.
Dr. and Mrs. Leifer subsequently made their home in New Haven, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Philadelphia, where he was a professor of pathology at Temple University until he died in 1991. They had two children; there are three grandchildren.
Rare books and manuscripts
When Leifer took the library position in 1988, it was still the Annenberg Research Institute. Walter Annenberg had quietly rescued the collection when Dropsie University went bust, and commissioned an award-winning building for it at 420 Walnut St. For 10 years, before Penn took it over, Annenberg funded the fellowships of scores of scholars to research Middle East history and Biblical studies.
In her first few years at Annenberg, Leifer assisted in converting thousands of rare books and manuscripts — typically in Latin, French, German or Yiddish — from obsolete call systems to an online data base, linked to the Library of Congress catalog system.
“I’ve made a life of searching and providing,” she says.
Whether taking food to needier families in the ghetto, providing for her troops in the army, nursing, helping travelers to Israel find their way or locating prize reference materials here, Judith Leifer is a relentless community resource.
Shot at Rydal Park,
York House, inspired
by his grandparents By Al Hornstein
Lillian, a 74-year-old widow, is nervous and apprehensive as she enters Rydal Park, a retirement community, starting what is probably the final phase of her life — among strangers in an entirely new environment.
So begins Old Days, a 23-minute film written, directed and produced by New York University graduate Matthew Shapiro,
a 25-year-old Philadelphian.
Old Days received a private screening in May at the Hiway Theatre in Jenkintown, and is being shown in film festivals.
The film was made possible through grants from the Warner Bros. and George A. Heinemann Film Production Award Funds.
Inspired by his grandparents
It’s the story of Lillian, played by Mary Beth Peil, struggling to find a niche in her new surroundings. Shot at the Rydal Park and York House South retirement communities, the film features actors from New York and Philadelphia, with residents of both retirement centers in cameo roles.
Shapiro, who graduated with honors from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has directed other short films and videos, including documentaries and TV programs. Old Days, which he says was inspired by his grandparents, “whom I love dearly,” has won several awards, including second prize in the NYU First Run Film Festival.
Mary Beth Peil played Grams on the Dawson’s Creek TV series, and appeared in several movies, including The Stepford Wives, The Odd Couple II and Flags of Our Fathers. She also was on Broadway in Sunday in the Park With George.
Kauders in cast
Brad Oscar, a featured performer, was nominated for a 2001 Tony for his role as the deranged Nazi playwright in the original cast of The Producers, and replaced Nathan Lane in the lead role on Broadway and the West End. Another veteran in the film is Helen Hanft, whose movie credits range from Moonstruck to Arthur.
Also in the cast are two Philadelphia actresses — Sylvia Kauders, who had a role in the Harrison Ford film, Witness, played the bag lady in The Sopranos TV series and has been in several Law and Order episodes and in many TV commercials; and Sarah Steele, who has been seen in films and off-Broadway.
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