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ABOUT NEW YORK
ABOUT NEW YORK; Still Caring for the Aged, Albeit a Bit More Slowly
WHEN Gertrude Landau was 32 years old, she became the director of the first senior center in the world. That was 50 years ago, and now, having gone from theory to practice, she was describing the changes she had seen in the lives of old people.
"We had no words like gerontology, and even senior citizen didn't come into use until 1951," Ms. Landau said, discussing the time in 1943 when as a social worker she volunteered to administer a room in the Bronx where old people came to play pinochle, drink coffee and listen to a radio. "There were no retirement communities. We didn't know about Alzheimer's."
Ms. Landau, just back from a two-week visit to London and Paris, was speaking in the offices of the New York City Department for the Aging, which today maintains 335 senior centers with a membership of 151,000. These serve 40,000 people a day, providing education, recreation, counseling on health, housing and legal matters and hot meals.
Among these is the William Hodson Senior Center, where Ms. Landau pioneered in the same way as Friedrich Froebel, who founded the kindergarten in 1837, or Lillian Wald, who established the Henry Street settlement house in 1893. Yes, she said, the center and her work there were indeed innovative, but with twinkling eyes Ms. Landau insisted that her motivation had not been idealistic.
"I was living in the Bronx, and I wanted a job closer to home," said the woman who, having graduated from Hunter College and Columbia University, was earning $1,800 a year as a caseworker. Very quickly, however, she was drawn into the work, eventually writing a standard text on the care of the aged that remains in print. She still lectures and consults. "But I don't take jobs that require me to begin before 10 o'clock, " she said, adding, "You have to adjust to slowing down, which is one of the things I learned from working with the aged."
She recalled that when she began there were no models to emulate and for some months people just came to sit, talk and play cards. "Unlike today, there were more men than women. They were mostly foreign born, and the languages you heard were Yiddish, Polish, Italian, German. I had good advisers from Bronx House, a settlement house, who urged me to take time and find out what the people wanted."
Ms. Landau, who is to be honored next Tuesday at a celebration at the World Trade Center marking a half-century of senior centers, said the first thing that the center users asked for were English courses. "At that time what everyone used to say was, 'You can't teach a dog new tricks.' One of the signs of how attitudes have changed is that you hardly hear that phrase anymore."
"I had realized that being poor and lonely and old was not enough to develop a sense of community. People who spent lives at work needed a substitute for the workday. I introduced a system of self-management, and the people began setting schedules and agendas." Language instruction was followed by art courses. A center newspaper was begun, elections were held for a governing council, and bazaars were held to raise money for the coffee and cake.
"Meanwhile, the country was experiencing a demographic breakthrough," Ms. Landau recalled. "Penicillin and the sulfa drugs were introduced, and people were no longer dying of pneumonia as they had been," said Ms. Landau. "The 1940 census showed a 33 percent increase in the number of people over 65. By the late 40's our center was a model for people who were coming from everywhere to study it."
"There are just as many kinds of old age as there are old people," said Ms. Landau, explaining that it was a mistake to regard old age as a universal experience similar to infancy. "We all slow down, but we all slow down in different ways." As in all stages, she said, life continued to be defined by relationships and the sense of achievement. But in old age relationships were often lost or strained while the possibilities of achievement tended to decline.
Such things were constant, but attitudes toward the elderly and the quality of their lives had changed greatly. "It is better now," she said. "Television alone has had a remarkable impact. People who used to sit alone in their rooms now keep the television on for company. Doctors, who used to invariably patronize older patients, have become sensitive. And there are many organizations where old people serve as useful and valued volunteers."
There are also the senior centers she helped to develop, 15,000 of them throughout the country. Did she belong to one? "No," she said, smiling, "not yet."
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