No Stone Unturned: The Life and Times

of Maggie Kuhn, by Maggie Kuhn

"Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week" is a quotation often attributed to Maggie Kuhn, the founder of The Gray Panthers

When I got my Medicare card this last August and officially became a senior citizen, I rushed off to begin claiming senor discounts in local stores. I started thinking about how those of us who are older are stereotyped. Old folks get hit with everything but the kitchen sink in negatives. We are castigated for being stuck in a conservative rut, and charged with every "ism" in the bigot basket. Old lady and old man jokes abound.

I can remember being afraid to start blogging at age 60 simply because I thought everyone who blogged was young and living in their parents' basements eating Cheetos. How's that for stereotyping? What could I possibly have in common with young bloggers?

I was wrong, and pleasantly surprised to find a lot of us from my generation and older right here at Daily Kos, and a great range of ages at Netroots Nation. More of us who have been on the front lines of organizing and fighting for decades are putting our arthritic fingers to the keyboard and sharing our experience and insights with many of you who may be younger, or the age of our grandkids, if we have them.

I want to celebrate us today, and focus on that group we put in the "elderly or senior" box in polling data. Starting with the woman who put the term "ageism" into our vernacular—Maggie Kuhn.

PBS highlighted her life and the Gray Panther Movement in a documentary now distributed by Women Make Movies called MAGGIE GROWLS.

Maggie Kuhn was never afraid to march to her own beat and fight for what she believed. Born in Buffalo in 1905, she was a passionate social activist right from the start. Maggie entered the workplace in 1926, with a job at the YWCA in Cleveland, organizing poor and working women. In 1950, she began a 20-year stint in the Social Education and Action Office of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. It was a job she adored, one that kept her in the forefront of the social activist movement for decades. When she turned 65 and was forced to give up the career she loved, Maggie decided that she would not fade away quietly. Saying "don't agonize, organize," and reminding them that they had nothing to lose, she galvanized a group of friends and colleagues who had also been put prematurely out to pasture and launched the career for which she is renowned: as founder and leader of the Gray Panthers. Maggie's second career unfolded in television appearances with Johnny Carson; on Capitol Hill, chiding senators and congressmen; and on the picket line, fighting injustice for all people, wherever she could. She also spoke fondly of her many love affairs and close friendships. Maggie's insistence on talking publicly about sex, which often made her listeners squirm, lead to a serious re-thinking about what growing old was all about. As Maggie said, "Sex and learning end only when rigor mortis sets in." In an era replete with "movements," the media quickly latched onto Maggie. Looking like the stereotypical sweet little old lady, when Maggie spoke, people listened. With a disarming mixture of humor, shock value and common sense, Maggie deftly used her high visibility to combat media stereotypes that denigrated the elderly and went on to champion universal health care, nursing home reform, shared housing and consumer protection. MAGGIE GROWLS looks at the forces that shaped the movement as well as its leader, using Maggie's life as a lens through which to examine the intertwined issues of social reform and aging in America.



She spoke in Vermont four years before her death, introduced by Howard Dean, about the role of older folks, stating "we are tribal elders concerned for the survival of the tribe."

Read her autobiography, No Stone Unturned: The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn and the excellent study of a movement, Gray Panthers, by anthropologist Roger Sanjek which should give you some new insights into us "wrinkled radicals."

I spend quite a few mornings each month checking into Margaret and Helen's blog, to see what those two intrepid and acerbic oldsters have to say about recent events.

They do not disappoint. Helen had plenty to say about the first presidential debate. I savor her opening salvo.

Well Margaret, once again I am going to say what the media won’t. Mitt Romney is a lying sack of shit and he wouldn’t know a middle class tax cut if it bit him in the middle of his gold plated ass.

(Continue reading below the fold.)