Success can come late

Age isn't always a factor in your success or failure. Consider these famous examples:

 

• Actor George Bums won his first Oscar at age 80.
• Golda Meir was 71 when she became prime minister of Israel.
• At age 96, playwright George Bernard Shaw broke his leg when he fell out of a tree he was trimming in his backyard.
• Painter Grandma Moses didn't start painting until she was 80 years old. She completed more than 1.500 paintings after that: 25 percent of those were produced when she was past 100.
• Michelangelo was 71 when he painted the Sistine Chapel.
• Physician and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer was still performing operations in his African hospital at 89.
• Doe Counsilman, at 58, became the oldest person ever to swim the English Channel.
• S. I. Hayakawa retired as president of San Francisco State University at 70. He was then was elected to the U.S. Senate.
• Casey Stengel didn't retire from managing the New York Mets until he was 75.

Excerpt: Glenn Van Ekeren. The Speaker's Sourcebook. Prentice Hall. New York, NY