Word: stagg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Stagg was 21 before he got to Phillips Exeter Academy to cram for college, lived Spartanly for a while on soda crackers while he pitched the baseball team to victory. Then he saw his first real football game (Yale 6, Princeton o). Dartmouth College offered him a baseball berth, but it had no divinity school. Yale had one, so it was to Yale that Stagg went, aged 22, with $32 to his name. He always ran from job to class to garret-largely because he had no overcoat to keep out New Haven's raw, dank cold. He kept...
...this, Stagg remains an active practitioner of the cult of physical fitness. He goes through a routine of bending and stretching exercises on awakening. He does pushaways, knee bends and chinning on an old fig tree in his yard, jogs around a small course that he has laid out from fig to apricot to pear-tree stump (about 100 yards at a time). He cuts his lawn with a hand mower, rakes his own leaves. His blood pressure is 135 over 90. The systolic reading is low for any man over 65; the diastolic is near the upper limit...
First of Everything. Across the U.S. there are scores or hundreds of men (and a few women) who "by reason of strength" have passed the fourscore mark under full productive steam, but their formulas for useful longevity differ widely in many cases from Stagg's. They are alike in that they have lived through the dizziest technological changes in man's history, and most have taken these developments in stride. To a child born 80 years ago, the transcontinental railroad, only nine years old, was a new thing. Electric power did not become publicly available until...
Among the wise old men who differ from Stagg on nearly all life's key issues are, aptly, two who have amassed huge fortunes from the auto industry-which, say some alarmists, is ruining the nation's health by eliminating the normal healthy exercise of walking. Appropriately, Directors Alfred P. Sloan Jr., 83, and Charles F. Kettering, 82, of General Motors, both proudly proclaim that they have never taken a lick of exercise in their lives. On level ground, the farthest they walk is from office or apartment door to car or from car to plane...
Sloan and Kettering are like Stagg in that neither has ever smoked, but not for his reason; they simply never got the habit. Boss Ket has a highball before dinner every night; Sloan toys politely with a drink in company, barely sips it. Where Stagg still lives on a fanatically sparse diet, Sloan and Kettering boast that they have no food fads, eat in moderation whatever is put before them...