Youth isn’t always wasted on the young. Despite the witty saying of George Bernard Shaw, some young people prove remarkably wise.

That certainly holds true of Sean McCue, the 23-year-old who manages McCue’s Taxi company in Watertown. No sooner had he graduated from college last May, than he had to take over the business from his father Robert who had suddenly fallen ill with leukemia, a disease that soon proved fatal.

As president, Sean directs a Watertown Square company that began in the 1930s when his great-grandfather Thomas McCue established it. In 1945, Thomas’s son Paul took over the business after army service in World War II.

Continuing the family pattern, Paul’s son Robert, after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, came home to help his father with the business. The 1970s were a time of expansion: the company acquired 14 licenses owned by Watertown Yellow Cab.

In the background during much of this time was Sean’s mother, Mary McCue, who took care of bills, paperwork, and taxes. Her son calls her “the backbone of the business” without whom the company would not be where it is today. In addition to this work, Mary McCue has been a kindergarten teacher for 33 years.

Unlike many other people his age, Sean McCue has a sharp sense of the past. Speaking of his company, he says: “It’s been in the family for four generations. I intend to carry on that legacy. That’s my father’s life work. I don’t want to do anything to harm that name.”

Sean keeps alive a vivid memory of his father. “I think of my father constantly,” he says. “I can’t go 15 minutes here without running into someone who knows him.”

According to Sean, his father responded generously to those who came to him for help. “He took care of a lot of little people, those who needed a second chance.”

Sean has inherited stories that form part of the company’s heritage. Once, in 1974, a woman with “Harvard” in crimson letters emblazoned on her sweattshirt came into the office carrying a bag crammed to the top. The contents turned out to be cash, stolen from the Watertown Savings Bank.

Robert McCue noticed what she had in the bag but arranged a taxi for her. Then he called the police who tailed the cab and stopped it. Imagine the driver’s consternation when he saw cops approaching him with guns drawn!

Another remarkable woman is remembered for having come into the taxi office dressed conventionally but then walking down the adjoining Spring Street with nothing on except, perhaps, a smile.

And Robert recalled being confronted with a young Irishman who was visiting the country for the first time. He was staying with his brother, a Watertown resident who roomed with a friend under whose name the apartment was listed. After a late evening at a local bar, the brothers became separated, leaving the visitor with only one vague clue to his brother’s whereabouts.

At five A.M, Robert directed one of his cab drivers to drive the visitor on a search for “a house near the water”. Finally, they found the right house adjoining the Charles River, but not before ringing a few other doorbells.

Then there was the story of a customer who ordered a meal from Low Fat, No Fat Gourmet Café in Watertown. He wanted it delivered to his room in Boston’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. The driver dutifully picked up the food, drove to the hotel where he was told to take the package up to the customer.

Opening the door was Manny Ramirez, a Red Sox star the driver had not heard of previously. To Sean, the action qualifies as “Manny being Manny.”

These stories offer a taste of life in a suburban taxi company. “It changes every day,” says Sean. “You never know what you’ll get.”

This young company president regards himself as fortunate to have so many drivers of mature years. “My best drivers are the older ones,” claims Sean. “They know how to get in and out of Boston better than anyone else. They know the community, having seen kids grow up.”

One of them, John McKinnon, has been driving for the company for the last 45 years. At least six others have chalked up more than 20 years.

Another veteran driver, Richard Brannelly, has been there 28 years. Of his job, he says: “It’s enjoyable work. I like the customers; I like the freedom of being out.”

Sean explains his approach to employees a generation or two older: “What I have been trying to do is gain their respect and at the same time run a business and show them I know what I’m doing.”

Ken Carlson, a marketing mentor whose office is above McCue’s Taxi, agrees with his friend Sean’s self appraisal: “It’s a fine line Sean has had to walk but I think he’s done it admirably.”

Richard Griffin

“I don’t know how to make the time pass.” In words like these, a friend laments the boredom that retirement has brought him. He wishes that he had more going on in his life so as to escape the emptiness of his days.

My friend needs something that would make a given day stand out as different from the others. Having them all on the same flat plane, with hardly any peaks and high points, renders his life oppressively dull.

In the contemporary industrialized world, it has become easier to escape the natural seasons than it used to be. Central heating, air conditioning, electric light─to say nothing of television and the Internet─can make us insensitive to the world around us.

And the secular quality of daily life usually makes us unaware of the liturgical markers that, in religious society, moved people to feel times and seasons as sacred. When, for example, the bell of my parish church rings out a prayer at noon each day, I wager that not one person in a thousand of those within earshot ever thinks of the special character of midday that the bells are meant to evoke.

Thus a sense of sameness and monotony comes to characterize the daily lives of many people, perhaps especially those of us whose lives are no longer structured by paid employment. We may chafe under the burden of excessive leisure that defies our capability for finding enjoyable and absorbing things to do.   

I thought of my friend and others like him during a recent talk given by a couple of my age peers, Elizabeth and David Dodson Gray. Using a variety of often unlikely props, these Wellesley residents collaborated in explaining how they use time to enhance  the life of their family.

Underlying their approach is the liturgical year of the religious tradition that they hold dear. Both of them are steeped in Christian theology, he as a retired Episcopal minister, she as a former divinity school student.

In their animated and colorful presentation, Elizabeth and David explain how, for variety’s sake, they divide the year into nine parts. For each of these seasons they have gathered objects that give expression to the season and act as stimulants to thought and action.

Basic to the “stuff” of each season is color. “For me, color is very, very important,” says Elizabeth. “God is a sensuous God,” she adds, in appreciation of the material world.

She speaks first about the season of Lent, which she and her husband are currently celebrating. This they do by bringing into their home many purple things, to create an atmosphere appropriate to a time of penitence. These include candles, flowers, small statues, paintings─ even wash cloths. Among the paintings is one of Jesus standing with other poor men in a breadline.

For Easter, they choose objects in yellow or orange. Pillows, Marimekko tablecloths, a painting of a sunflower, tulips and other flowers. All of these things express that “we are living in a rejoicing time.”

The next season is the month of May. Then they emphasize Mother’s Day, an observance that Elizabeth considers important because it can serve to honor mothers everywhere. The color she chooses is pink. Pillow cases, a basket filled with dried roses, candles, and a poem written by a minister friend all mark the occasion.

To celebrate the arrival of summer and its duration, the couple selects blue and green. This reminds them of the sea as they try to bring the natural world into their house.

In the fall, walks with the children were scheduled so they could collect leaves in various colors. The house is decorated with stained glass autumn leaves. Orange and yellow runners appear on the dining table. A still life of seasonal fruit is prominently displayed.

The four other special times for this family are Advent, Christmas, Mid-Winter, and Valentine’s season. Each of them bears a distinctive color motif, blue for winter and red for Valentine’s, for instance.

At first glance, this segmenting of the year into nine parts may seem forced, even precious and fastidious. But viewed sympathetically, it qualifies as a clever way of marking and enlivening the days of one’s life.

“The mood of the whole house changes dramatically,” says Elizabeth of the scheme she and her husband have concocted. They experience at first hand the power of the senses to affect one’s interior life. Bringing up their children in this way must have given them a concrete sense of what distinctive times and seasons mean.

This scheme strikes me as valuable for its power to differentiate among the days of human life. Not all days are the same. Some are special; others less so.

As Elizabeth says of her experience: “It lights up time for you. It makes you much more appreciative of the seasons.”

Richard Griffin

The folks at Miller Brewing Company have done it again. Once more they are using old people to sell beer. Their latest television commercial shows two oldsters in the service of Miller Lite. If you share my low tastes and watch professional sports, you may catch it on the tube as I did last week.

A year and a half ago I wrote a column about a previous ad which showed an elderly couple on a couch late at night making out. Called “Young at Heart,” that commercial was made for Miller by an advertising team from Sweden. I called one of the actors, Marge Lintz then 80 years old, and asked what she thought of the ad.

“I don’t understand how anyone could be critical of it,” she said, as she rejected negative views alleging exploitation of elders. Her only complaint was that at the end of two days of filming her chin was rubbed sore by Hal’s beard.

The current ad, “Old Man,” lasts 30 seconds and has no spoken words. It opens on a cook-out with people milling around. The camera first focuses on an old man who is casting amorous glances toward a woman sitting on the other side of the open space. She is shown animatedly talking to beer-drinking young women, presumably her daughters, sitting on either side of her.

Then we see the old man approaching, leaning on a cane as he walks toward the woman. The older woman’s face lights up with anticipation as he draws near.

When he gets close, he stops, and accepts a bottle of Miller Lite that a young fellow has removed from a cooler and thrust into his hand. Having received the beer, the old man turns around and walks back into the distance. The camera returns to the older woman; her face registers a mixture of disappointment and pretended indifference. The guy obviously had preferred the beer to her.

In an effort to evaluate the ad, I recalled background given me earlier by my favorite advertising guru John Carroll, now at WGBH. Speaking about “Young At Heart” he had told me, “A lot of campaigns are like this .  .  .  outhip the other guy. They’re strictly image ads hip, cynical attitude .  .  . they want to make it edgy.”

He suggested that the older people were being used to grab the attention of young viewers who have grown up so saturated by television ads that, if you are to get them to notice anything, you have to shock them. And what’s more shocking than old men and women feeling sexual passion?

The actress in “The Old Man” is 74-year-old Clara Harvey with whom I talked at length. She turns out to be a remarkable woman, someone who emigrated from the Yucatan fifty years ago and who now lives in Los Angeles. She started acting only two years ago and loves it. Of this particular ad she says, “I thought it was wonderful” and she quotes approvingly her daughter ‘s judgment – “hilarious.”

A wise and witty friend, Mike Shinagel, also takes a straight-out benign position. “Equal strokes for old folks” he tells me approvingly.

For a more detailed view, I talked to an old friend, Joe Perkins, current president of the American Association of Retired Persons. Joe favors analysis of the ad from two angles.

First, he says the ad reflects the humanization of older people in American society. “Neither ad would have appeared a few years ago,” according to Joe. “The woman had feelings, she was hopeful.”

But he also expresses concern about possible toying with elders. “If they intended the ads to be pejorative,” Joe adds, “then they’re bad ads.” Mind you, he was laboring under the disadvantage of not having seen either one. Presiding over the 33-million-member AARP clearly does not leave much time for TV.

My own feelings reflect the tension between the two views. On the one hand, I welcome seeing older people in advertising. Thus far, we have been underrepresented in that medium. When shown, we have too often been portrayed as needing dentures or laxatives. Our image has been usually associated with some form of decrepitude.

However, I also feel the need to take older people seriously. The trouble with both beer ads is that they make old people cute. The ad makers use advanced age to play with viewers, to entertain them with images of older people doing things associated with youth, and ultimately to titillate television watchers with visions of geriatric sex.

Sex at any age has its ludicrous aspects; when shown in elders it is easy to make it look quite ridiculous. The suggestion that an old man who needs a cane to walk could be sexually attractive to a woman his own age is calculated to stir up in viewers complicated emotions.

With no little anticipation, I shall await the judgment of this column’s readers.

Richard Griffin

“I won, he lost” boasts Daniel Schorr, summarizing the outcome of his collision with President Richard Nixon in 1974 over his covering of Watergate and its aftermath. “I had survived an attempt by the president of the United States to do God knows what to me,” he tells this columnist in a recent interview.

That happened after Nixon put the then CBS reporter on his now-infamous “Enemies List.” Placing number 17th of 20 names, Schorr parlayed his notoriety into riches.

As he now describes his victory, “It typified my whole career: I tried to investigate, people who were investigated got mad at me, and they never did anything to me. In the end, as it turned out, I got a lot of fame in being an enemy of Nixon, it netted me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lecture fees.”

Now 90, this icon of American journalism divides his career into two parts. Before the domestic segment, he served for 20 years as a foreign correspondent.

One of his achievements as CBS’s man in Moscow in 1957 was getting a televised interview with Nikita Khrushchev in his Kremlin office. “Don’t ask me how I did it, but I did it,” he tells me as he looks back.

He also takes pleasure in an exchange with Khrushchev at a diplomatic reception. The international atmosphere was especially tense at the time and, according to rumor, the Soviet Central Committee was about to meet in special session. But Dan Schorr was scheduled to go away on vacation for two weeks.

He presented his dilemma to Khrushchev: “My capitalist bosses say ‘you can’t go on vacation’ and I don’t know what to tell them.”

Then, sotto voce, the Soviet leader assured him: “Mr. Schorr, you can go on your vacation.” But he added: “If absolutely necessary, we’ll hold the meeting without you.”

With chutzpah like this and a fair amount of luck, Schorr built a career that stands out in the history of American journalism. He owes some of his inspiration to Edward R. Murrow, the eminent CBS broadcast pioneer whose example of investigative reporting stands as a memorial.

Schorr believes deeply in the freedom of the press. He sees this freedom as a basic right, necessary for the wellbeing of American democracy. At an awards ceremony that followed my interview, he staunchly defended the role of investigative journalism.

Against all comers, he will uphold the right of journalists not to reveal the identity of unnamed sources. He regrets that this latter privilege “does not today enjoy widespread public support.”

It did in 1976 when the House Ethics Committee threatened to send Schorr with jail for releasing a confidential report of illegal actions by the CIA and FBI. Letters from the public presumably helped sway the committee not to punish him, though only by a five-to-four vote.

Schorr also deplores the control of today’s media by a relatively small number of corporations. And he is upset that some outlets focus on trivia rather than solid news. Fox News, he tells, devoted more than 13 times as much coverage to the death of Anna Nicole Smith than it did to news of the horrors of Walter Reed Hospital.

Listeners to National Public Radio, will recognize Schorr’s resonant voice almost immediately. It remains strong, although some frailties of advanced age have marked his body otherwise. Veteran journalism professor Alex Jones, at the awards ceremony honoring Schorr, told of restaurant waiters addressing the latter by name as soon as they heard his voice.

About the present condition of the United States and its future, Schorr feels deeply pessimistic. As he looks back to the 1930s and the Depression, he recognizes difficult times. But then, there was hope that things would improve.

In that era and later, there were huge problems. “Yet always underneath it there was a sense of we’ll fix it.” He adds sadly:  “I don’t have that sense any more. At 90, I’m almost glad to say─hey, you fix it. I did my part. I’m too tired.”

When I asked about retirement, however, Daniel Schorr issued an adamant negative. “The only thing that keeps me going,” he replies, “is the fact that I’m still working. I’m not sure what I would do if I didn’t have the structure of my day made every day, by reading the newspapers, calling the editor at NPR saying this is interesting, I think I’m going to write a commentary on it.”

His current work does not require much physical exertion, he observes. But it clearly calls upon him to use a great deal of brain power. And that he retains vigorously. Among other things, his memory is tenacious as he recalls the events of a life filled with happenings and personalities of historic importance.

He ends the interview with a definitive statement of his attitude toward his present status: “I find the best medicine for old age is work.”

Richard Griffin

“It is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” This announcement appeared in the first issue of The New Yorker magazine, published on February 21, 1925.

Also, “it hopes to be gay,” said the editors, thereby displaying another sign of the periodical’s age.

But, as if pleading for indulgence, they added: “It recognizes certain shortcomings and realizes that it’s impossible for a magazine fully to establish its character in one number.”

My access to this literary heirloom has come from a surprise Christmas gift. My spouse gave me a complete electronic set of the magazine through February 2005.  By inserting an appropriate CD into my computer, I can locate and read anything that appeared in the pages of The New Yorker.

That includes cartoons and ads, as well as commentary, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The index allows me to find any one item quickly, a boon for a literary junkie like me.

Some of the names found in these pages reverberate in me and will in some of my fellow readers: James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, George E. Kaufman and others bring back the witty writers of the Jazz Age.

To veteran readers of The New Yorker, the cover of that first 1925 issue will bring immediate gratification. Drawn by Rea Irvin, it displays the elegant, iconic character Eustace Tilley, sporting a very high collar and a top hat. With dignified hauteur, Tilley is examining a butterfly, using his monocle for detail.

The price for a New Yorker subscription was five dollars, no small sum for the time. Its orientation toward readers with deep pockets appeared from an ad on page two. It displayed a fancy perfume from the Paris company Caron.

Through the years many New Yorker subscribers have taken the magazine for its cartoons. They could not be bothered with the writing but loved flipping through the pages looking for the best drawings with humorous captions.

The cartoons have become a feature of America’s intellectual landscape, much discussed and laughed over. A perusal of them through the years reveals important currents of the time. Not rarely, they also baffle the viewer with references that have long faded from collective memory.

The first issue carried a section called “The Talk of the Town.” This feature would become a fixed department of the magazine and provide a vehicle for sophisticated, witty, and politically charged commentary on all sorts of events and personalities.

I greatly enjoyed searching later issues for the work of a friend, Agnes Bourneuf. According to family report, this longtime proprietor of the Thomas More Book Shop, in Harvard Square, had published two pieces in the New Yorker. Thanks to the complete index, I found them right away.

Agnes’s first contribution, published in 1945, turned out to be a short, humorous, and poignant story about a secretary who discovers that her sister’s family calls on her only when they need money. It showed great flair and might have been the start of a long career of published prose.

The second piece was a brief memoir of growing up in Nova Scotia. It appeared in the issue of  November 27, 1948. Here, too, Agnes proved her talent with words, perhaps whetting the appetite of New Yorker readers for a distinguished literary future.

Agnes, however, did not ever publish anything else in The New Yorker. Her career as a writer apparently began and ended between those two years. I wish she had written more but her superb work as a bookseller provided compensation for me and many others, including her fellow authors.

Admittedly, The New Yorker still caters to sophisticates of a sort. Of course, it also reflects and addresses people of the city from which it takes its name.

However, as a non-New Yorker and a person of dubious literary sophistication, I still value having this electronic treasure-trove of generally fine writing. Having at hand many of America’s most distinguished writers – John Updike, E.B. White, Scott Fitzgerald, James Thurber – gives me inspiration.

I also value having a record of changing tastes and fashions through the last 80 years. My birth came in the third year of the magazine’s existence and we are growing old together.

Others have been even more addictive than I. My late mother-in-law read The New Yorker from the first issue on, and always remembered the general alarm provoked by her uncontrollable laughter at “The Night the Bed Fell,” by James Thurber. This piece appeared on July 8, 1933 and quickly become a comic classic.

Having it on CDs rather than in mile-high piles of glossy paper also benefits me. As a result of this convenient packaging, I do not have to summon a clutter consultant to extricate me from towering mounds of magazines.

So hail to The New Yorker. May we both continue to flourish for years to come.

Richard Griffin

“I’ve had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.” This extraordinary statement comes from Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust, as quoted by New York Times writer Sara Rimer.

I suspect that many older people have conversations with long-dead parents. I certainly do.

Perhaps because I am male, I talk with my father more than my mother. I carry on an inner dialogue with him as I review the past that we shared and speculate about a shared future that his death deprived us of.  

Another motive for this dialogue may also be that, from teenage years on, a certain tension marked my relationship with my father. It’s as if I wish to remedy that situation now, so many decades after that possibility ended.

What does Drew Faust, the newly chosen president of Harvard University, say to her mother? We don’t know but we can speculate.

Some of it almost surely centers on what Faust calls “continued confrontations” with her mother about what it means to be feminine.

Reportedly, her mother brought her up to be an old-fashioned southern woman. She expected her daughter to observe the hard-and-fast social guidelines of the traditional Virginia society in which the family lived.

That meant “a community of rigid social segregation” as Faust herself describes it. Not only were racial divisions kept strictly, but so were those between rich and poor. In that setting, horseback riding for the privileged classes loomed as much more important than efforts to reduce the distance between groups of people.

A friend of Drew Faust has observed that she was brought up to become the wife of a rich man. This kind of social destination now seems at a far remove from her call to become president of a great university.

Presumably, her new job has now taken its place among the topics that Faust talks about with her mother. The latter, four decades dead, would have been astonished at the way her daughter’s life has evolved. Step by step, the hoped-for southern belle has been transformed into one of the foremost educational leaders of America.

With my own father, I review aspects of his career that I failed to ask him about when he was alive. When in 1939, as a reporter for The Boston Post, he sailed to Rome and covered the election of Eugenio Pacelli as Pope Pius XII, did he have any inkling of how the war in Europe would confront the new pope with agonizing decisions?

What most influenced my father, I can now ask, in moving from a fairly mainline position to the political right?  I cannot forget that one of the floral arrangements sent at his death came from Senator Joseph McCarthy. However, I like to think that my father would have turned against the Wisconsin senator after more information about his duplicitous tactics was exposed.

Most of all, I now think about the adolescent rifts that I provoked, spoiling the close relationship we had in my earlier boyhood. One of my deepest regrets connected with my father’s early death, (he was only 56) has been the lost opportunity to repair the distancing that had occurred as I moved into my teenage years.

Moving to safer ground, I wonder what he would think about the decades from 1930 to the middle 1950s. He observed social change from up close because he had to write and speak about it. In his newspaper columns, in weekly television appearances on a current-affairs program, and in talks he gave to various groups, he had reason to analyze the shifting currents of life in America.

My father would probably not be surprised at some of the changes in Boston society and elsewhere. I remember him telling me at the end of World War II that our national life could be expected to change radically. Apparently he foresaw the burst of post-war prosperity and what that would do for America.

Many years later, I discovered that he had predicted to my mother that I would eventually leave my first career, that of being a Jesuit. Apparently, he saw more clearly than I did some aspects of my character that would eventually make me opt for that radical change. He may have known me better than I knew myself.

For my father and my mother, too, I feel greater sympathy than I ever could when younger. This change strikes me as typical of us as we grow older, encountering more and more of the challenges that our parents must have faced.

To their problems we, in our maturity, can now bring much greater understanding than formerly. This provides further material for the inner dialogue by which we continue spiritual contact with them.

Maintaining and cherishing spiritual bonds with our parents, even long after their death, becomes an important part of our character. It enhances our inner life, quite possible making of our later years a richer experience.

Richard Griffin

In 1832, the town of Sandown, New Hampshire auctioned off three impoverished women ─Anna Harvey, Ruth Collins, and Molly Blough─to the lowest bidders.

Each “purchaser” agreed to these two requirements:

1. to move the person or persons “off to the place where he intends to support them”;
2. to provide “suitable Meats, and Drinks, Bedding mending, Nursing, & Tobacco if needed.”

No bidder was to be selected unless, in the opinion of the town’s three selectmen, he had the means to support the pauper. The town agreed to pay for clothing and a doctor.

Anna Harvey was successfully claimed by Captain Daniel Hoit who bid 75 cents a week. The other two women were taken by David Pressy who bid 74 cents for Ruth Collins and 80 cents for Molly Blough.

This is what happened to some of the aged poor in one New Hampshire town in the 19th century and other places as well. Approaching local government for help meant agreeing to a loss of freedom. The impoverished person could also be required to work without pay, making the arrangement come perilously close to a form of slavery.

The legal document behind this arrangement can be seen online in the town clerk’s handwriting. The web site can be found at http://www.poorhousestory.com/AUCTION_POOR.htm  

Later on, “workhouses” were established in many places as a way of curing people from laziness, the alleged cause of their poverty. These institutions were later succeeded by “poor farms” or “poorhouses” where aged people were sent to live with others, often including the mentally ill and criminals.

I have discovered this slice of history through a new book, Aging Nation, written by two scholars personally known to me. Robert Binstock, one of the authors, is a political scientist who used to teach at Brandeis where long ago I took his course on aging and public policy. The other, James Schulz, an economist, is an emeritus professor at the same university.

The authors’ main reason for recalling the way the aged poor were treated in earlier America is to show the difference that Social Security has made. Starting in 1935, this federal program, initiated by Franklin Roosevelt, has gradually helped assure most older Americans of at least some financial independence.

Binstock and Schulz emphasize how Social Security, in freeing people from dependence on their children and from the often humiliating means testing required by other programs, gives older Americans the kind of revenue system they feel comfortable with.

Social Security fits comfortably with our tradition of independence and self-reliance, they point out. Recipients have paid into the program and it is seen as an insurance system rather than a dole.

The system also has other virtues that most people have little awareness of. A notable feature is the way Social Security, from the beginning, has been skewed to favor lower earners. Some with insufficient contributions to the program have been enabled to receive more than they were strictly speaking eligible for.

Both authors believe strongly in the advantages for Americans at large assured by a system that has always paid out what it owes. By contrast with many pension benefits promised by private employers and not delivered, Social Security has never missed coming through with payments.

The writers deeply distrust schemes such as the Bush plan that would privatize Social Security by relying on so-called “personal accounts.” Though they think it wise for the system to invest some of its money in the financial markets, they stress the undesirability of having recipients take charge of managing their own accounts.

Most Americans do not possess the expert knowledge necessary to make wise choices in complicated money matters. Nor are they interested in managing the dollars invested for them by the federal government. For spending our time, most of us have found more interesting ways than that.

I certainly qualify on both these counts and feel fortunate to have found assistance in basic planning from some knowledgeable and trustworthy professionals. Beyond that, I am ill-equipped to go, and much prefer sports, music, and the other arts to financial planning.

Public programs of the magnitude of Social Security are best handled by public authority. As the authors of Aging Nation state: “Only governments can secure the benefits promised in old age─given the economic vicissitudes of global, regional, and community shifts in economic opportunity in the face of such things as changing product demand, technology, the competitive milieu, and macroeconomic events associated with recession and inflation.”

Unfortunately, some Americans are still impoverished in late life. But when you consider the way old age relief was handled before the advent of Social Security you have to be grateful for this life-saving program. The United States was not the first nation to adopt this response to the plight of impecunious elders and it was not easy to get the Congress to approve it in the middle 1930s.

However, in time its arrival would make the New Hampshire town’s response to the poverty of three women look primitive indeed.

Richard Griffin