Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

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In fact, less than 1% of the elderly leave their own states. The highest proportion of the aged outside Florida is in Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota on farms and in communities from which youth has fled. In small towns, the able elderly turn abandoned buildings into "senior centers" for cards, pool, slide shows, lectures and pie socials. In Hebron, N. Dak. (pop. 1,137), grandmothers use the balcony of the former J.C. Penney store for their quilting. But there is little socializing among the rural aged, who often subsist on pittances of $60 a month, and become even more isolated as public buses disappear from the highways, cutting off their lifelines to clinics, stores and friends.

A third of the nation's aged live in the deteriorating cores of the big cities. On Manhattan's Upper West Side, thousands of penniless widows in dingy single-room-occupancy hotels bar their doors against the alcoholics and dope addicts with whom they share the bathroom, the padlocked refrigerator and the telephone down the hall. "Nine out of ten around here, there's something wrong with them," says a 72-year-old ex-housekeeper living on welfare in a hotel on West 94th Street. "I get disgusted and just sleep every afternoon. Everybody dying around you makes you kind of nervous." Terrified of muggings and speeding cars, the disabled and disoriented do not leave their blocks for years on end, tipping anyone they can find to get groceries for them when their welfare checks arrive.

Close to a million old people live in nursing homes or convalescent facilities provided by Medicare. A new growth industry, nursing homes now provide more beds than hospitals. They are badly needed. But in many of the "homes," the food and care are atrocious. Patients have even been confined to their beds merely because bed care entitles the owners to $2 or $3 more a day. Mrs. Ruby Elliott, 74, recalls her year in a California nursing home with fear and bitterness: "It's pitiful, but people are just out for the money. That whole time I was among the living dead."

Fewer than half of the country's 25,000 nursing homes actually offer skilled nursing. Arkansas Congressman David Pryor recently visited twelve nursing homes near Washington, D.C. "I found two where I would be willing to put my mother," he said. "But I don't think I could afford either one on my $42,500 congressional salary." Pryor is trying to set up a congressional committee to investigate long-term care for the aged.

How terrible strange To be seventy.

Simon and Garfunkel