Dave Kearns

…everyone else is getting younger. I didn’t appreciate reading in this morning’s newspaper that an “elderly” man’s body had been discovered south of San Jose. He was 61! Today is my 62nd birthday – how depressed did that make me feel?

I note that now the on-line version of the headline has been changed to “Deputies call death of San Jose man in Morgan Hill suspicious” certainly a better (from my perspective, if not the victim’s), more neutral news headline. I wonder if it was the editor, or the reporter who considered 61 to be “elderly”?

This is on the heals of another news story from a few weeks ago where two firefighters were killed trying to rescue a couple from a burning house. The 67-year-old man and his 61-year-old wife were described as “an elderly couple” both in the paper and on the TV news for a couple of days before a correction was made.

I can handle “senior citizen” and wince (but suffer through) at “golden ager” but if we call sixty-year-olds “elderly,” wha’s left to characterize the 85 year old?