Barbara Washburn and Brad Washburn, married sixty years, would be judged dynamic people even if he were not ninety years old and she but four years younger. Keeping up with the energetic repartee between them as I tried to recently, as they talked about their lives, proved a challenge.

The two of them are widely known, with Brad famous throughout the world for his expertise in aerial mapping, among other  things.

When she was a young mother, Barbara became  the first woman to climb Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest peak. “When I got home, Mayor Curley gave me the keys to the city,” she recalls.

Brad first climbed that mountain in 1942, and is the only person to have reached its twenty thousand, three-hundred-and-twenty-foot summit three times.

These adventures are among the many that have marked their life together. They have operated according to an activist  motto formulated by Brad: “If there is something you can do, or think you can do, do it.” To top it off, he quotes Goethe: “Boldness has power and magic in it.”

Now resident at Brookhaven, the continuing care retirement community in Lexington, these energetic partners continue to seize opportunities for new involvement in the larger world. I got acquainted with them during a recent weekend in Portland, Maine where they were giving talks at a conference of business executives. Both the Washburns spoke eloquently about their private life together as well as about their world-wide adventures.

It’s not as if they have not known adversity. “I’ve been recycled three or four times,” says Brad, referring to the triple bypass surgery he underwent in his eighties and a later aneurysm. And Barbara became desperately ill in Katmandu and had to be rushed to a medical center elsewhere for emergency treatment that came just in time.

Experiences like these have led the Washburns to adopt this as a philosophy – “You’ve got to have a sense of humor to get on in life.”

Lightheartedly, Brad attributes his initial interest in mountain climbing to a desire to get rid of an allergy. “Hay fever made me climb Mount Washington,” he claims, and at the top he found none of it.

Beside his reputation as an explorer and intrepid mountaineer, Brad is known as the founder of the Boston Museum of Science and first director, lasting forty-one years in that position. It started in a location in Boston’s Back Bay and was then known as the New England Museum of Natural History.

He takes great pride in the growth of this institution from its modest beginnings. When he started, the museum had a budget of forty-four thousand dollars. Now it boasts a budget of thirty-nine million and attracts 1.6 million visitors a year.

He first met Barbara when she applied for a job as his secretary. Before taking the job, she was convinced she could get something better. Brad, struck by her personality, had to call her for fourteen straight days before she finally agreed to it.

On her first day at work, she recalls, the great zeppelin, the Hindenburg, sailed over Boston. That was in 1937 and this airship was on the way to Lakehurst, New Jersey, where a spectacular fire would destroy it.

At the Portland conference, Brad showed slides of the splendid aerial photographs for which he is famous. He has flown over the tallest peaks on earth and made records of them much prized by geographers and other scientists. He is remarkably skilled at this art as well as courageous enough to explore forbidding heights. He boasts of having made 697 helicopter landings in the Grand Canyon.

I found these two elder adventurers not only dynamic personalities, but also people glad to share their experience with others. At the conference, they took obvious pleasure in talking with those younger than they, and joining in their social events.

Though their level of activity does not involve the risk-taking it once did, they remain vitally interested in life around them. Their minds are well stocked with the adventures of a long life together, a storehouse from which they draw readily for the benefit of others as well as their own enjoyment.

Over the years, they have received much attention in the media. As far back as 1947 Brad made a movie for RKO and their exploits have been documented in many other formats. But again, they do not seem spoiled by all the publicity. Instead, they keep at their projects, Brad writing and taking care of his mountains, Barbara playing vigorous tennis and taking long walks.

They have managed not only to remain married but they give evidence of enjoying one another’s company. The secret of their staying together in marriage? “We did a lot of things together,” they suggest.

That such vigorous people have adjusted to one another’s ways for sixty years attests to remarkable flexibility of character. No wonder conference attenders several decades younger than the Washburns listened to them with fascination as they described their adventures, public and private.

Richard Griffin