An Inspiring Conversation about Aging with Noted Journalist Lesley Stahl

Happy New Year!

For my first post of 2025, I’m pleased to bring you an interview with Lesley Stahl, an award-winning journalist and one of my favorite female reporters. I taped the interview when I participated virtually in the Annual Symposium on Positive Aging hosted by The Wechsler Center For Modern Aging at the Marlene Meyerson Jewish Community Center in New York City.

The keynote for the day featured Lesley in conversation with author and journalist Abigail Pogrebin. Now in her eighties, Lesley is still going strong at CBS “60 Minutes.”

The Annual Wechsler Symposium is all about positive aging

I always enjoy the Wechsler Symposiums which as they say “aim to inspire older adults to live their lives to the fullest and pursue the years ahead with purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.” Past speakers have included New York Times columnists and authors Jane Brody and Anna Quindlen.

The Symposium took place in November right after the elections. Lesley shares highlights of her career including experiences as a female reporter that spans from the 1960s to now, as well as her childhood, her family life, her role as a mother, a grandparent, and as a caregiver to her husband — all contribute to her incredible fulfilling life.

A long interview

This is a long interview — 5900+ words. I thought of editing out complete Qs but couldn’t decide which ones as they are all so good. Read these excerpts at your leisure or pick and choose what appeals to you. I found all of Lesley’s remarks interesting, perhaps because my 35+ year career was in the communications field too. I can relate to many of the things she spoke about — looking back and looking ahead.

Award-winning journalist Lesley Stahl was the keynote for the Symposium

Introducing Lesley Stahl

To give you a peek at Lesley’s accomplishments over many decades, here’s her bio:

“Lesley has worked at CBS News since 1972 when she covered Watergate scandals during the Nixon administration. She was a CBS White House correspondent during the Carter, Reagan and much of the George HW Bush years. From 1972 to 1991 she moderated “Face the Nation” on Sunday mornings. She has been at “60 Minutes” since 1991. While there she has authored two books “Reporting Live” and “Becoming Grandma.” (I read Lesley’s book about grandparenting after becoming a grandma last August  — it was spot on.) She and her late husband, the author and screenwriter Aaron Latham, have a daughter and two granddaughters.

Going strong at “60 Minutes”

Abigail: “Your still doing a full slate for 60 Minutes. There are a certain number of stories expected each year. Just how are you deciding how much to travel, how much to do? You’ve been to Israel three times and you’re going again this week. Wow. Give us a sense of the Lesley routine right now.”

Lesley: “Each correspondent has a team of producers and the team comes up with the story ideas. Our stories are not assigned and that is one of the most wonderful things about this job. I think for a television journalist this is the epitome of a place to work. The fact that we choose our own stories is one of the main reasons. Other correspondents are often doing stories they’re not interested in or they hate. We love all our stories and they’re all like our little children.

People say what’s your favorite stories. It’s always the one I’m working on. That’s a huge part of it. They call it a producer’s shop. And the producers have a lot of power there. To still be at it at my age (don’t ask)…you can see that I love it. Mike Wallace worked until his 90s, Morley Safer worked until his late 80s, and a lot of our correspondents sadly die on the job. It is the most wonderful place to work in terms of journalism.”

Abigail: “And are you planning to go until you can’t?”

Lesley: “You know it’s really funny…I’m always checking myself. How are you doing? How is your memory? How’s your walking? And I think I have a funny feeling that everybody is doing that with me now — my producers and I think my boss, after I go on a long trip. I just went to Bhutan for a story. That was a trek. I think they debriefed about me, my stamina, my brain, my walking.”

Lesley’s travel tips

Abigail: “I’m tired when I travel. Do you have kind of a regiment that keeps you feeling fresh?

Lesley: “When I travel I take Ambien. I never take it here, but the minute I get on the plane I take it. I eat before I get on the plane and then Ambien. And then every night wherever it is I take Ambien so that I’m not jet lagged. Then I stop when I get home.”

Abigail: “What about packing?”

Lesley: “I have that down. I never check luggage. Even for a week. I pack light and I try to buy clothes that don’t wrinkle. But the first thing I do is get the ironing board out. And put a note on it to not pack up.”

Lesley’s interviews with Trump

Abigail: “So in terms of coming out of this election, you didn’t cover this one. But you tried to get Trump for an interview and you interviewed him how many times before?

Lesley: “Five times before, including the one you and I produced.”

Abigail: “He was showing us his gold bathroom. I think it was 1997. It was a story about Guiliani when he was still revered. He had cleaned up Times Square. I want to go to the time when he walked off the interview. How do you deal with that? What I admire about you is that you are unflinching. You don’’t seem to balk or push back or maybe walk off the set.”

Lesley: “You know I covered the White House for 10 years. That is training for exactly what you’re asking me about. A press secretary calls and yells at you at least once every other month. And if they’re not then you’re not doing your job.

The first time it happened I cried. It was on the phone thankfully. Do you remember Robert Pierpoint? He covered the White House. When I first got there during Jimmy Carter he was a veteran already. I went to him and I said ‘the most horrible thing happened. Jody Powell just yelled at me.’ I’d never had anyone yell at me with that kind of power and the tears are coming.

He said oh, the first time the press secretary yelled at him “I cried too.”

Abigail: “Back to the Trump story. How did that all play out?”

Lesley: “He came into that interview in a bad mood. I had interviewed him three times before and we did have a cordial relationship. I don’t know if any of you know him but he is capable of enormous charm. He did pour it on for us not just the correspondent and producer but the crew. It was in the White House and he wanted to make sure they all had water to drink and he didn’t do that this time.

Lesley answered candid Qs about her interviews with Trump

He kept bringing up Hunter Biden’s laptop. I had said to him — you know we can’t run anything that’s not true. We had talked beforehand at great length about how we really didn’t want to run something and say that’s not true. So whatever wasn’t true had to be confronted in the interview.

We studied really hard for all the issues that we wanted to ask. I said that story hasn’t been confirmed. He kept coming back to it. He finally said you have enough. And he said he would see me later. We had planned a walk around outside. He didn’t get really angry until he got back to the office. On Twitter he said “watch for constant interruptions and they appear to take out my recently brilliant answers to their questions.”

We were on the phone with Mark Meadows for an hour long. He decided that we falsely edited people. We don’t do false editing. So it fizzled for him. Pence came on afterwards. This was not a rally. This was supposed to be an interview. I told them I feel you have insulted “60 Minutes” and me.”

Truth in journalism

Abigail: “Journalism has been so degraded. There was so much rigor when I was coming up in journalism. Anything you put out you have to substantiate. There was no sense of invention. Now we don’t know exactly what is the truth.”

Lesley: “There are three parts to this. There is the issue of truth. There is the issue of the public’s trust in us. And three. and what I was talking about with Mr. Pence, was the responsibility that elected officials have to be accountable.

The way they are held accountable in our system is through the media, through the press. Through the questions that are asked by legitimate news organizations and it’s their responsibility in our system to to give serious and honest answers to serious questions.  And in that response to Pence,  I thought I was saying you’re letting the public down not me. I’m the intermediary. I’m asking questions I think the public would like to know and should know. And by ducking and walking out he wasn’t answering questions either. So that was that.”

The loss of faith in us

…there is a temptation to blame it completely on Trump because he did diminish the public’s faith in us. This was an aside. It was not on camera it was in his office. I said to him why do you keep attacking the press. It’s so boring. You just say the same thing over and over, you pound away. Don’t you think it’s time you give it up?

And he said “no.” Why are you doing it? And he said “I do it so when you say negative things about me they won’t believe you.” He said that. My first reaction was wow he really thought this through. This is a strategy. A thought out planned strategy. But the loss of faith in us started before.

I started covering government and politics in 1968. Nixon was president and Spiro Agnew was VP and he ran around the country saying that we were negative and we were not truthful. It was also Nixon’s strategy to make us appear as if we were all liberals and all out to get them. So this is something that started ages ago.

Democrats in power hate the press too. We’re trying to get out something behind what they want their message to be and we’re also trying to find out what’s going on backstage. So they all see us as enemies and that’s true in all democratic societies. It’s obviously taken its toll. I saw a poll that 12 percent of Republicans think the press is honest and fair. And it’s not great among Democrats. It’s only like 38 percent. So we have really suffered.”

Reflections on the 2024 election results

Abigail: “I want to touch on last Tuesday (the presidential election) how are you processing it?”

Lesley: “I’m pressing it like everybody else in the room because I didn’t cover it. Even if I had covered it I’d still be in the place I think we’re all in which is trying to figure it all out.

Why did certain groups vote for Trump and why didn’t certain other groups not vote in larger numbers for Kamala? Was it the issues, the immigration and inflation? Was it that she was a woman? Was it that it was boys against girls in this campaign? There are just so many questions.

Was it the historical time? I kinda believe in this theory that there are historical cycles and we’re in like a pendulum, when it goes too far left it swings right. Maybe this is a correction. There are so many possible answers.

I just think we’re all trying to figure it out inside ourselves. I don’t think any one person I’ve read really knows specifically why to diagnose it. Groups that were expected to vote one way didn’t. Groups that were expected to come out in droves didn’t.

A look back at Lesley’s childhood

Abigail: “I want to go back to your childhood. When we were preparing for this you said people don’t ask me about my childhood. Which is fascinating. You are really a rare example of an incredibly long successful career without scandal. Where did you grow up? Tell us a little bit about your parents and you are Jewish — which is not something you’ve talked about a ton.”

Lesley: “I don’t talk about it at all. BTW this place is amazing (referring to the JCC of NYC). My husband who isn’t Jewish, who had Parkinson’s, we live about a block away. And he came here twice a week for boxing which is wonderful for Parkinson’s. They have a program designed for people with Parkinson’s. It’s just great.

I grew up in Swansea, Massachusetts. It was very rural. My mother had grown up in Boston. My father had grown up in Swansea and my mother was a little shell shocked about living in the country. But that’s how I grew up.

My brother and I and my friends lived on the little street and that’s where we played. There was a brook that ran behind the houses across the street and the big contest was can you jump over the brook.

When I grew up and went and looked at that brook it was tiny. The second contest was jumping off our garage roof. We rode our bikes everywhere. No locks on our doors. Parents said when you were four years old go out and play and don’t come home until you hear me calling for you. It was that kind of thing.

I didn’t think it was ideal when I was growing up. I look back and I say it was healthy.

My father grew up in Peabody, Massachusetts and he was active politically and he was a liberal Democrat. Even though he ran a company. My grandfather started the company and my father ran it. And my mother was a right wing Republican and she was on his case.

She said “How can you be a businessman and not be a Republican?” And this fight went on for my whole childhood. And the fight blew up every two years. She voted for Nixon twice and I thought he was going to kill her. And she was not one of those women who did obviously what her husband told her to do.”

Abigail: “What was your dad’s business?”

Lesley: “My grandfather and his entire family all came here around 1900 from Poland. My grandfather and his siblings were all lumberjacks. They moved to Peabody and there wasn’t a lumber industry. So my grandfather went to work in a tannery.

They discovered that he had a talent. His talent was being able to distinguish between colors. So if this barrel of color was black and they wanted to make another batch, it often didn’t match. He knew how to make the match. And there were three colors in those days – black, brown and ox blood (which was a kind of red brown). Other tanneries came and tried to steal him away. He kept moving up in the tannery world.

He ended up in Binghamton, NY.  He had two brothers — there were three boys. They moved to Binghamton. And my grandmother said “we’re going home. We’re going back to Peabody.” My grandfather said “why?”  She said “Because there is no kosher butcher and that means there are no girls for my boys to marry.”

Day four she moved back to Peabody. The women are strong in my family. Pretty soon my grandfather followed and they started making leather colors at home on the stove. And he made the first blue and the first red and they started a leather finished company that my father ended up running.”

Abigail: “You said you don’t talk about the Jewish piece much.”

Talking religion, race and gender

Lesley: “I don’t talk about being a woman reporter either. Ed Bradley was the same way. Ed Bradley and I started around the same time together in Washington, DC. We had this conversation once. You know the early feminist back then (CBS hired me in 1972) and they hired me because of affirmative action. It was really popular in the early 70s. Companies wanted to prove that they had hired women and minorities. So we were young and they used to push us out front to do assignments we really weren’t ready for.

I’m getting off the subject of the question but this is interesting…

In the Washington Bureau, the chief who hired the affirmative action babies, there were 3 of us, set up an apprenticeship program for us where we would go out with senior correspondents. They were not required to mentor us or teach us just to let us tag along and watch what they did every step of the process. We were basically not allowed to go out and fall flat on our faces on day one.

Lesley spoke about her experience being a female journalist

All three of us went on to have huge careers. Connie Chung, Bernie Shaw at CNN, and me. It’s because of that. So many young people in that affirmative action program were pushed out because the companies wanted the public to see they had women.

Abigail: “So I know that you had said that where Ed said he didn’t really want to cover the civil rights movement, you didn’t really want to cover the women’s rights movement.”

Lesley: “I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as the woman reporter because up to that point women just covered parties and the First Lady. We wanted to be assigned to politics and the Pentagon and economics. It hurts me a lot and I write about this in my book on Washington is that I missed that. I missed out on the women’s movement in the beginning.”

Abigail: “But women look to you as a role model in the women’s movement.”

Lesley: “I don’t get that. I’ve heard that. I guess it’s an example.”

Abigail: “Were you conscious of the women coming after you? Mentoring women in particular?

Lesley: “Much later. I think that until I got to “60 Minutes” and maybe even in beginning years it was still a question of fighting for the good stories, fighting to be looked upon the same. It was a constant daily march up the hill every day. And sometimes you were pushed back. This wasn’t just me, this was all the women. All women in all professions and in the country as a whole.

We were marching toward the equal rights amendment. We were sure to get it. I started covering the White House with Jimmy Carter. He was pro-ERA. We were two states away and Reagan came in and we just slid back down and we had to start all over.”

Pressures of aging

Abigail: “You wrote “when I started on television in the 1970s I was told that as a woman I would not survive on the air past the age of 40. I guess the thinking was that the sagging would sag at the ratings. As time went by as 40 became 50, then 60. Hey fellas I’m still here in my 70s.” You wrote “ain’t it the darndest.”  You know it’s not the darndest. The pressure is so profound particularly in television.”

Lesley: “I want to say why it’s the darndest. It’s the darndest because when people said women weren’t going to last past 40 or 50 they didn’t know because there weren’t any. How could they know? It was amusing to me and I knew they didn’t know that from the beginning. Because they looked around and there weren’t any.

Barbara Walter’s survived into her 80s. Diane Sawyer is still going at it. There aren’t droves of women who survive past a certain age but there aren’t droves of men who survive past a certain age either. I’m not saying women don’t suffer more than men for this. They do. But a lot don’t. And it’s not just me.”

Abigail: “What about just the reality of having to keep up with a certain look?”

Lesley: “Look men do too, those toupees, are you kidding me?”

Abigail: “Is this a quiet sorority and fraternity of what you have to do to keep up?”

Lesley: “Yes and it is not discussed. It is a given. You don’t have to be beautiful but you have to present yourself in a way that people don’t say – did you see her hair? You want them to say – did you see that story? You don’t want to be distracting. So if there’s a uniform you get it.

When I got to “60 Minutes” one of my favorites with Don Hewitt, executive producer. — right my first week — the woman who he had a contentious relationship with Meredith Viera, one of the nicest people who I know in our whole business. They clashed and she left. Harry Reasoner left at the same time.

I filled that hole. He had been publicly criticized in a huge New York Magazine article about how he had treated Meredith. So he was determined to get along with me. He lavished me with praise and great stories.

One day he walks into my office and closes the door and says — “I’m about to say something and it’s going to ruin everything. I’m insane to bring this up but I have to do it. I hate your hair. You look just like Nancy Reagan.”

They hired me when I was 50 years old and if I had been 40 I would have said you can’t talk to me like that. But I didn’t, I was 50. You know how we are when women get older. No big deal.

So he sent me to someone. It was all about the color. The colorist said yeah they are putting ash in your hair. You don’t want to wear ash. That was it.

And then he came back and said “I don’t like your clothes either.” I said “buy me some new clothes.” And he did. He didn’t care what I wore when I was interviewing someone but he cared what I wore in the studio when we introduce our stories. I like color and he wanted me to wear black, gray or brown because that’s what the men wore. He didn’t want brown, gray, purple in front of the clock. He bought me a whole new wardrobe.

It’s all about your image

Abigail: “I know you can’t talk about your own looks. My mother cofounded Ms magazine with Gloria Steinem. One of the things that she is very honest about when she looks back at why people could hear a tougher message from Gloria was partly because she was beautiful. That actually when she went on any news shows they were dazzled by her and it allowed her to come out swinging without them realizing it. There was something about the outward presentation that could make it more palatable to people to hear a message. That’s unfortunate but it’s reality.

So for you in terms of how you moved through particularly in your early career, was the fact that you are beautiful, was that something that you knew was an asset that allowed you to move faster and higher?

Lesley: “I’m going to answer your Q very directly. First, it’s true of men too. The better looking they are the more people watch and are drawn to it. So it’s a human thing.

So I’m not beautiful but my mother who ran my life till I had my own child at 35. I mean bought my clothes, sent me to hairdressers, demanded I take my glasses off. My mother said to me “get those glasses off your face.” I thought I needed glasses to appear more serious.

She said that’s stupid. “They don’t want to see that you have gravitas they want to see that you look good.” I argued and she said “does Walter Cronkite wear glasses, does Barbara? You’re putting a barrier between you and the audience with those glasses on. It has nothing to do with you promoting some kind of image being a heavy weight.” She was always the one who shaped the way I looked from the youngest age.”

Quintessential teenage crush

Lesley: You asked me about my childhood. Everybody has the quintessential story. Here’s mine. I was in 7th grade and I had this horrible crush on Joseph Kates. My girlfriend Linda had the first push button phone in town. You could be on two lines and you could push pause and get on another line. So she is on with me and she gets a call and she puts me on hold and she says it’s Joseph Kates. I said ask him if he likes me.”She comes back “no.”

So I said find out why. She comes back and she says “he thinks you’re ugly.” So I cried until I get a fever.

My mother who was never home was home. She walked in and I told her. She says “that you would like a boy with such limited vocabulary – I know what he means, he means that you are too thin. We’re going out to buy you a whole new wardrobe. Also as I look at you what he meant was that your hair is mousy.”

She poured a bottle of peroxide on my head and lemon juice and sat me outside in the sun. I was 12. I’ve been blond since I was 12.  The way you wear your hair – no. She dragged me to the hairdresser and cut off all my hair. Now I had short blond hair before I had long messy hair.  She said “those shoes, why have I put you in corrective shoes.”She bought me a navy blue skirt with a large crinoline, a red cinch belt, pink blouse with babydoll sleeves and Capezios.

Last thing she said “he meant that you were pale.” So she took her lipstick and put rouge on my lips.

She said “where are the kids today?” It was Saturday. We all went to he movies every Saturday. We had one theatre in town. She drives up and says “get out.” I said I can’t he will be there. She said “that’s the point – he will be there.” She kicked me out of the car.

I sat next to my best friend Linda. Joseph Kates was directly behind me and threw popcorn at me the entire movie. I knew what that meant and I hated him. And I hate him now.

However, lesson learned from my mother. That really was formative.”

Abigail talked about aging.

Lesley responded about being older:  “I wrote a book about being a grandmother and so many people told me that I shouldn’t do it. You’re going to tell everybody you’re a grandmother? You’re going to tell them how old you are?

Every year for someone like me my birthday is on the radio. And age is blaring. The idea not to tell the public that I was a grandmother really pissed me off. I said I’m going to tell everybody how wonderful it is to be a grandparent. I’m going to celebrate this and I hope that it opens the door for everybody to say publicly or with their friends how much they love being a grandparent. It’s one of the great joys of growing up. It’s one of the reasons to enjoy being our age.”

Being a caregiver

Abigail: “I want to fast forward to your long marriage and how you took care of Aaron at the end. Lessons for anyone from the caretaking? (Her husband had Parkinson’s.) How has it changed your life? What are you left with thinking about that time?

Lesley: “Parkinson’s most of you either have in the family or know somebody with Parkinson’s. One of the reasons we have so many people with Parkinson’s is that people are living longer. It’s a disease mainly of age.

I believe that grief is connected to guilt. I did not want to ever feel guilty when he died. So I was very conscious of that. He begged me never to move him out of the house. He had a friend who was living in a nursing home. He begged me to never do that.

So he was always at home. It was really expensive. I didn’t want to get help in the beginning for a long time. We live in a very tiny apartment here and the idea of other people being there was something I was afraid of having all different strangers in my house. I look back on that and it was a mistake. It was foolish, but that’s what happened.

He fell a lot because his balance was off. I now know that I was in a state of almost constant terror. But I didn’t know that then. When that becomes your life every day you don’t know it because it’s you. It’s just you.

He was a very sweet man. He never got angry. Of course he was on a lot of anti-depressants. Plus you take dopamine when you have Parkinson’s which adds on to that. He was always very even tempered which makes a huge difference.

When he died for the first time I realized that I was walking around with a hundred pounds of bricks.  Then it went away. I thought, oh wow, I didn’t know that. The thing is whatever you do don’t be afraid to get help. That was stupid of me.

Abigail: You’ve also written about his depression and that Mike Wallace was helpful there. Can you tell that story.

Lesley: Before Aaron went on dopamine, he had serious depression for many years. Right when I got to “60 Minutes” Mike said “how’s Aaron? ” I had never diagnosed him with having depression. I never thought that. But the words came out of my mouth. I said Aaron’s depressed. He said “I hope he seeks help. I hope he is on medication.”

How out of it was I? Medication? Now these ads were on television morning noon and night. I saw them and it didn’t penetrate. Medicine? He physically grabbed me by the shoulders and said “get him help.” I said he won’t go to a psychiatrist. I had suggested it and he won’t go. And Mike said “find a way. Do not make this man suffer another day. He doesn’t have to and he is.” So that changed my life too.”

Aging and longevity

Abigail: “You’ve done multiple stories on aging and its amazing how it’s shifting with who’s living and for how long. You said in one piece where the nation is living longer and longer extra years, that the number of Americans age 90 and above is expected to triple.

That story was done in the early 2000s. And you said that factors associated, things that don’t surprise us are exercise, moderate drinking of alcohol and caffeine, social engagement and our favorite — putting on a few pounds as we age. The 90+ study that you were reporting on the focus is memory and dementia.

Then you said half of all children born today in the USA and Europe are going to reach their 103 or 104th birthday. That’s amazing. Do you want to say something about that?”

Lesley: “So that story I did was around  2004. We talked about 90+ and we called them the oldest of the old.

I just went to a conference and I moderated a panel on longevity. This conference was about 100+. That is about 20 years that we had moved from the fact that there is this large population over 90 to the fact that there’s this large population of healthy people living to be 100 functioning in our society. That amazes me.

I do think we’ve learned that you can’t smoke, I think that’s a huge factor, that we eat better and we exercise and of course all these diseases that we’ve eliminated from our lives. We really are stuck with several diseases of aging — they’ve made progress on a lot of them, including Alzheimer’s.

In fact that is what this conference was about – new drugs that are actually slowing the disease down as opposed to the drugs we’ve read about just a couple of years ago. Really serious new avenues for Alzheimer’s but not Parkinson’s – nothing, zero.

Abigail: Lesley and I used to go to the same gym. The whole premise is you lift very heavy weights and I have given up on this whole thing because at a certain point it was too hard. And she has been doing it for 20 years. So she is stronger and braver.

The audience asks questions

Qs from audience members included one about Lesley speaking up about being Jewish during these times of antisemitism.

Lesley: “I’ve done four stories on Israel in the past year and a half and I’m going again at the end of this week. We talk about objectivity in journalism. Nobody is completely objective. Nobody is without opinion. I have really tried very hard to be fair and balanced and it’s old-fashioned.

My daughter hates our kind of journalism. She said we want to know where you’re coming from. I want to be able to cover all these stories and have credibility and I spend a lot of time in my head making sure that I’m seeing both sides. I do believe in my kind of journalism done this way. And I’m not religious.

Lesley answered a Q about legacy media like CBS and what is going to happen to it, keeping reporters out of jail, with the future administration: “You are where I am. What you said is what I’m worrying about. The only thing we can do is put our heads down and keep doing what we’re doing.

It may be that we’re in the sunset. It may be that we are in the end. It’s possible that in my career I’ve lived through an arc. The idea of objective journalism really didn’t come around till after World War II. All the newspapers came from one side or the other side going back.

When television news started that’s really the birth of what we’re talking about. So maybe it’s an arc, it had a beginning, it had a peak and it’s coming down and the lights go out. I don’t know but it has crossed my mind. It isn’t saying journalism ends, it is saying a kind of journalism may end.”

Lesley answered a Q about being older: “I wrote a book about being a grandmother and so many people told me that I shouldn’t do it. You’re going to tell everybody you’re a grandmother? You’re going to tell them how old you are? Every year for someone like me my birthday is on the radio. And age is blaring. The idea not to tell the public that I was a grandmother really pissed me off.

I said I’m going to tell everybody how wonderful it is to be a grandparent. I’m going to celebrate this and I’m hope that it opens the door for everybody to say publicly or with their friends how much they love being a grandparent. It’s one of the great joys of growing up. It’s one of the reasons to enjoy being our age.”

Wow-o-wow, see why I’m a Lesley fan! Thanks for an amazing interview!

Judi

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