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Bob Capellini, 70, never figured he would join his fellow seniors online. "Cap," as he calls himself, is not a trendy guy. A product of the Depression, he shops at Sears and clips coupons despite having earned a comfortable retirement for himself and his wife in Temple Terrace, Fla., a Tampa suburb. He has a desktop computer but never thought of going online until his son Steve suggested it so they could e-mail each other. "What do I need that for?" Capellini asked his son. "I was very apprehensive at first. You know, the older you get, the more conservative you get, and I thought it might break my computer." But Steve convinced his penny-wise dad that e-mail was cheaper than phone calls. Soon he got a message from his dad: "Steve, I did it! I'm online!"
Capellini didn't stop there. He read a newspaper column describing www.switchboard.com an Internet database of telephone white pages across the country that could be used to find old friends. He decided to look for a cousin, William Lucini, in Philadelphia, whom he had not seen in 60 years. Capellini found two people with the right name; the second was his cousin. "My fingers were trembling as I punched in the numbers," he says. "I didn't know if he would talk to me." When he said, "This is your cousin Bob Capellini. Do you remember me?" Lucini answered, "Yeah, I remember you. You got me in trouble when I was seven years old!" Capellini recalls, "I got an overwhelming sense of joy when I heard him say that. I knew immediately that he remembered me and had a great sense of humor."
They are planning a reunion. And Capellini has gone on to look up high school chums as well. "Out of everything I've done with the computer, lining up old friends and relatives has been the most rewarding. I guess I could have somehow done it another way, but this just put the tools at my fingertips."
The Internet is a tool that is especially appealing to many people because it's the great equalizer, making age, gender and appearance irrelevant. Betty Kamen, 72, says many seniors like the Web for that reason. "No one knows that it may have taken you longer to type an answer," says Kamen, a nutrition writer. "If there are minor disabilities, no one knows about it."
Kamen came to the world of computers reluctantly at first. She had been writing her nutrition books on a typewriter when her husband came home one day in 1982 with a new IBM PC. The first time Kamen tried writing on it, she split a paragraph on the screen and panicked. "I couldn't figure out how to put it together again. The manuals were written by techies, and they were awful." Within two weeks, she was in love. When Kamen and her husband moved from New York City to Novato, Calif., several years ago, she would allow no one to pack her computer. She carried it on her lap.
When she reached California, her son Paul persuaded her to log onto the WELL, a Sausalito-based online community that predates AOL's chat rooms. Most of the users were men in their 30s and 40s. Says Kamen: "I was female, and I was by far the oldest. The value was being able to log on without being identified by age or anything else. It was really liberating."