Welcome to the club
An earned membership
During the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics I had the pleasure of working as fixer for CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Bill Geist, and a 60 Minutes camera crew based out of London. Of all the titles I’ve had over the years (Lecturer; Analyst; Founder; Director; Editor; etc etc), Fixer remains far and away my favorite. If Geist wanted to do a piece on, say, the ubiquitous plastic food models in restaurant displays in Japan, it was my job to figure out how to make that happen. This was still pre-3G and pre-cameraphone. Research largely involved shoe leather and phone calls. We did have Internet access in the broadcast center.
As the Games approached, I got on the newly completed Hokuriku Shinkansen connecting Tokyo and Nagano. CBS had sent an array of talent to the Games: Bryant Gumbel; Martha Stewart; Kennedy (yup, the VJ, since snowboarding was now an Olympic event); and David Letterman’s Mom. (I recall playing frisbee or Nerf football - probably the latter - with Kennedy in our media bullpen area. I also got to follow around Tara Lipinski with a boom mic when she visited a local hospital.) Chicago-area residents may recall Howard Sudberry. There was a group of fixers, each paired with a correspondent. I felt I got the luck of the draw - Geist has a sense of humor, as his pieces on CBS might indicate. He was fun to work for, and clear about what he wanted.
On duty at the Nagano Olympics
The regalia - CBS News gave us a big bag of Nike-branded winter gear. I still have the duffel and its contents, now used for the occasional ski trip in NorCal. I dusted the vest off for some Olympic-themed Japan Society programming back in 2019, back when we thought the Tokyo Games would happen in 2020.
Geist retired in 2018 after a long run on CBS Sunday Morning. I wish Bill well on his new adventure. His son, Willie Geist, is on MSNBC.
When I moved back to the States post-Nagano, I picked up Geist’s book, The Big Five-Oh!: Facing, Fearing and Fighting Fifty. In it, he depicts surviving his AARP attack - the moment the AARP card arrives, heralding entry into a club into which membership is earned, one day at a time, or as a wise friend once said, through long nights and short years.
The other day, as I opened my mailbox, I thought of Bill. I had received my own invitation to the American Association of Retired Persons. Punchlines abound, of course. At least the sign-up incentive wasn’t a hot water bottle.
Free with your membership
I’ve been a consumer of AARP’s research for some time. In 2018, AARP’s Journal put out a richly produced special on aging in Japan, excerpts of which I used in an MBA class in spring 2022. Now, of course, having earned membership to the club (where’s the velvet rope?) I get to experience the aggregated power of the senior bloc. Here’s to the Longevity Economy!
In population pyramid terms, looks like I’m part of the left shoulder.
In Clusters class, we look at The Great Divergence, a chapter in Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs that looks at the difference between brain hubs and former industrial hubs still trying to recover. Part of the great divergence, as Moretti describes, is the growing difference in life expectancy by zip code. In Marin County, male life expectancy is now around 85 years. Fidelity tells me its longer. Which is both sobering, and exciting. There’s much to do.