Some of you may know Mo Rocca from The Daily Show while others know him as a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning. Mo is also the author of Roctogenarians, a new book that tells the inspiring stories of people who followed their dreams and achieved success later in life. People like Laura Ingalls Wilder, who published her first “Little House” book at 65 and Samuel Whittemore, who fought in the American Revolutionary War at 78.
Mo sat down to talk with us on an episode of Varsity’s podcast, Roundtable Talk, to discuss how a casual conversation with Chance the Rapper changed Mo’s perspective on aging, the key to longevity, presidential history and what makes 1888 such a great year to be born in.
During his chat with Roundtable Talk host Derek Dunham, Mo shared some fresh perspectives. Here’s a few:
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO AS YOU AGE?
I’m looking forward to caring less about what other people think of me. That’s one of the connections among the people in this book—they’re very unfettered. They felt very free to act and to go for it because they weren’t hamstrung by the opinions of other people.
A lot of young people, in figuring out who they are, to use modern parlance, crowdsource their decisions—seeing what works, what gets a good response, what gets likes on social media. But people at the other end of life aren’t doing that. They’re much more sure of who they are.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT RETIREMENT?
I don’t expect to ever retire. But certainly things will evolve, and what will that look like? All I can say is that I’m driven to make things interesting to people who didn’t expect to be interested in them. That, to me, is very, very satisfying.
If I say, “I’m going to do a project, a book, a slideshow, a talk about one-term 19th-century presidents”—and there are a lot of those guys, you know, stuffed between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, a lot of facial hair, usually from Ohio—I love that someone might say, “Really?” And then by the end of it, they’re into it.
DID ANY STORIES IN ROCTOGENERIANS PARTICULARLY SURPRISE YOU?
I knew vaguely that there were older people on the front lines )of the civil rights movement). What I didn’t know was the story of Mary Church Terrell, who was 86 when she led sit-ins at Washington, D.C., lunch counters in the 1950s to fight segregation. Part of what I found so powerful about her story is that someone of that age wasn’t fighting for a better world for themselves—at best, she would enjoy that world for a couple of years. And indeed, she died at 90 shortly after the Supreme Court conferred victory on her side.
YOU WRITE THAT WHEN SOMETHING ENDS, SOMETHING ELSE MUST BEGIN. HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED THIS IN YOUR OWN LIFE?
A very dramatic example—I’m not sure it quite fits, but I’ll call it my late-in-life triumph—is that my husband and I are now fathers to a baby girl. We’re first-time fathers. So, let’s just say my life as someone without children has ended, and, boy, what a great thing to begin.
