By Marie Elium
We want you to meet Kathryn Eyring, Tracey Mason and Karen Talbott. Our three Impact Awards honorees are innovators and problem-solvers who make life better for those of us 50 and older in Northeast Ohio.
As Northeast Ohio Boomer and Beyond celebrates its Fifth Anniversary with this issue, it’s our pleasure to throw a much-deserved spotlight on these women, nominated by friends and co-workers who have had a front-row seat to their accomplishments.
Our magazine was founded to encourage “Better Living After 50.” These honorees show how it’s done. With an astonishing amount of creativity, compassion, and hard work, Kathryn Eyring, Tracey Mason and Karen Talbott help countless older adults have not just better lives — but in many cases — their best lives. And they’ve done it with humor, skill and commitment.
We can think of no better way to mark our anniversary.
Meet Kathryn Eyring
Creator, Host & Producer of Aging Gracefully TV
Nominated by Glenn M. Blair, retired business executive, Standard Oil (Ohio) and Baldwin-Wallace University:
“As a yoga instructor, health coach and functional aging specialist, Kathryn guides seniors in strength and fall protection. Appreciation and respect for older adults is her message as she challenges cultural misconceptions of what aging looks like as well as the diminished value of aging adults in a modern, fast-paced community. Kathryn encourages people to embrace maturity of life with enthusiasm. She believes long lives are blessings to be shared and celebrated. Her motto is, “Live a long, healthy life without regrets.”
“Do you want to see my garden?”
I catch up with Kathryn Eyring as she nimbly steps through the raised beds in her backyard, a block from Lake Erie.
The garden, like Eyring, has a lot going on: tomatoes, beets, cucumbers and more. The tour takes time because Eyring likes explaining what she planted and why. She’s a natural teacher and skilled cheerleader. Right now, she’s promoting the season’s lush harvest.
When we sit down in her screened porch to talk about her “Aging Gracefully TV” and how she ended up as Boomer Impact honoree, Eyring stops the conversation.
“Do you like pickles? I made pickles. My first time,” she says. Eyring goes inside and brings out a jar of pickles and plops one onto a plate in front of me.
“Wait. Do you mind if I record this for my website? I’m recording peoples’ reactions.”
The pickles were delicious. You get the idea that there’s not much Eyring does that she doesn’t do well. And, as promised, she later sent me a link to her pickle-tasting segment, my reaction edited in.
A Poster Child for Healthy Aging
Eyring uses that same energy and enthusiasm to promote healthy aging through her “Aging Gracefully TV,” an interactive online community for people 50+. Her series of webcasts, classes and public-access TV shows are Eyring-conceived, produced and executed. Because of COVID-19, she’s been recording many from the basement of her Avon Lake home.
As is true for many people, but especially Eyring, the pandemic has been an uneasy fit. “It’s not that I don’t take this seriously. I cannot live in fear. You cannot think rationally if you live in fear.”
The mother of three grown sons and a grandmother to four, Eyring’s positive nature and silliness come through with her online videos. She’s passionate about promoting healthy aging and looks the part, crediting yoga and healthy eating — again, the garden and other habits she promotes through her website, aginggracefully.tv.
Eyring, 61, is such a dynamic, powerful and youthful-looking advocate for aging, it’s hard to think of her growing older. She embraces what’s ahead with peaceful, positive confidence. Her mother died at age 45 in a car accident. Eyring considers every day a gift.
Why focus her career on serving people 50 and older?
“I’ve always really loved older adults and I wonder if it’s because I had such an excellent relationship with my grandparents. I adored my grandparents,” she says.
Children and teens are the focus of many community programs. Providing internet access during the pandemic is an example that comes to mind. But if older adults don’t have the internet, they can become isolated. “If we’re going to give to the kids, please, I want to give to the seniors. I think the focus so often is just on younger people.”
Many factors keep older adults from being fully integrated into their communities.
“There is an assumption, for one thing, that they are not tech-savvy. But I think, given the opportunity, so many of them are whizzes with the stuff. When all of my classes went to Zoom, I helped everyone who needed it. But 75 percent of them didn’t need any help. They were able to figure it out.”
Eyring has learned a lot from her older friends and students.
“Seniors have told me, you have to make sure you’re always feeding young people into your social funnel. You’re a scientist, you’re a principal, you’re a doctor. When you speak with them, you learn so much is in the past. That’s when I started thinking, ‘these people are amazing.’ They didn’t just stop having some quality life when they retired. These are people who just keep it going.”
She continues, “I started the TV show when a woman came out to my class in Bay Village and she was 85 at the time. She told me she teaches Tai Chi two to three times a week and had been doing it for 20 years. And she played the cello and she just started it when she was 80. She was my very first guest on the TV show. And I thought, ‘You’re just amazing. How do you do this? Tell me more.’”
“I want to be like this until I drop at 104,” Eyring says. “I actually picked yoga as my late-career choice because I’m thinking it’s something I can grow with and nobody can say you’re too old to teach yoga. Only I can say that.”
Meet Tracey Mason
Administrator of Cuyahoga County Division of Senior & Adult Services
Nominated by Denise Rucker-Burton, program administrator, Cuyahoga County Division of Senior and Adult Services:
“Tracey has a deep passion for serving older adults…overseeing a $22 million budget that provides services to 30,000 older adults.Tracey rebuilt DSAS’ technology infrastructure to improve health outcomes and service coordination for older adults, resulting in a $1 million Electronic Health Record system.”
Conversations through a computer video feed are clumsy affairs. Necessary because of the pandemic, it can be difficult to get to know someone when you’re relying on an internet connection and a computer screen… unless you’re talking to Tracey Mason.
This is a person whose particular background and irresistible enthusiasm for helping older adults translates through computer lines and linkups. Mason, 52, not only likes what she does, she knows why she does it.
Family Ties, Family Values
Managing a sprawling and complicated government agency is occasionally frustrating and certainly cumbersome. It’s tough to balance budgets, client needs and public officials’ demands. In some ways, Mason was born for the job.
“My mom and I are 14 years apart and, because we were so close in age, my grandmother had a firm hand in my upbringing,” she recounts. “She was a social worker herself, so I remember as a kid, volunteering in the food pantry with my grandmother. I remember going to civil rights marches with my grandmother. I remember packing Christmas toys for other families with my grandmother. And so, throughout my life, I have had women – from my grandmother to my mom to my aunt – who are deeply dedicated to social services. So that has been instilled in my heart.”
After retirement, Mason’s late grandmother volunteered at the Hitchcock Center for Women. Mason spent Tuesdays and Thursdays enjoying time with other older adults at the St. Martin de Porres Family Center. Her mother, Ruth Williams, is executive director of the Lorain Urban Minority Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Outreach Program.
“This work is very personal for me, this is not about professional change; it’s about personal growth and how I can continue to contribute to those marginalized families.”
As is true with nearly everything today, the pandemic has hit particularly hard among the people Mason is responsible for helping.
“The biggest impact that we have experienced is not being able to have that face-to-face contact with many of the clients that we service, which we all know, was disproportionately impacting seniors and our older adults. So we had to also balance safety of the staff as well as meeting the clients’ needs,” she says.
“We’ve not had that face-to-face contact and many of our seniors looked forward to seeing their social worker show up for the day. We had to quickly change and began to make wellness calls so all of our face-to-face contact that we were having with our clients became daily check-ins.”
Earlier in her career, Mason was Vice-President of Partnerships and Client Services with the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. She understands the impact on a family when they can’t afford food and how a pandemic amps up the need among older adults.
“One of the things we noticed is, food insecurity was on the rise. And we were fortunate to have an onsite food pantry so we were able to take out groceries to our clients. We were able to deliver groceries, place them on the front porch and let the client know that we were there. We were able to meet the need, from a distance, and that has had an impact on everyone,” Mason shares.
Mason says access to information is the biggest barrier older adults face: who to call for what you need.
“I’m deeply committed to making sure there’s a live voice responding on the phone. Every intake system I’ve ever been a part of, my first priority is that there’s always a live voice to talk to. We also know a lot of times when you’re on the phone with an older adult, you don’t know who else they may or may not have talked to that day or the day before, because social isolation is real.”
Raising public awareness is another area Mason embraces. “The greatest misconception is that all of their needs are provided and are taken care by Medicaid or Medicare and that they have no need for additional services or that their family has the capacity to take care of their parent or grandparent,” Mason says.
She continues, “In the work that I do, I often say we have to build a system for us, for everyone. This is not about my grandmother and my mom. I have an opportunity to help build a system that will help the next generation of older adults… and what resources can be shaped now so we can build communities that are supportive of older adults.”
More than most people, Mason is in a unique position to reflect on what her life may look like in the next few decades.
“I look forward to getting older. I look forward to becoming a grandmother, I look forward to just enjoying my life and being able to give back in other ways and retiring with my husband,” she says.
“Is it scary sometimes to think about those resources you’re going to need some time, too? Absolutely it is, and so I’m often thinking about what I can do today, whether it’s for Tracey Mason or anyone else, so that at a minimum, I’ll know who to call.”
Meet Karen Talbott
President Child Guidance & Family Solutions, former Facilitator of Leadership Akron NEXT
Nominated by Susan Kosco, Director of Community Engagement, Leadership Akron:
“Leadership Akron NEXT is a two-month program designed for community-driven individuals who are approaching, experiencing or mastering retirement. NEXT offers the opportunity for experienced leaders to define their next chapter of community involvement and impact while engaging with other like-minded individuals. Serving as the facilitator from 2012-2019, Karen Talbott has been the heart and soul of NEXT. Without her, there would be no NEXT. She has made the program possible in so many ways.”
At 73, Karen Talbott is at an age when most people are either retired or are thinking about retiring. Instead, she’s spent much of this past decade helping others choose their next place, their next role in the greater-Akron community.
Her day job is leading a medical specialty practice that provides emotional, mental and behavioral health services and programs to children, adolescents and adults. Although she’s spent most of her career as an administrator for health care organizations, Talbott’s experience with Leadership Akron has been of particular interest, as has its offshoot, NEXT. She was in one of Leadership Akron’s early classes, became a board member, then started working with NEXT in 2011.
Leadership Akron, like similar programs throughout the country, forms a class of area leaders each year and does a deep dive into the community, with speakers and tours focusing on topics ranging from education to government, businesses and social services, recreation, the arts and more.
Talbott speaks in a firm, confident voice that projects her unabashed commitment to NEXT and the importance of people finding a place in their community. We met for the first time via videoconferencing, where her enthusiasm came through loud and clear.
Discovering Where You Live
The goal of NEXT isn’t necessarily to match older adults with volunteer opportunities, although that’s a frequent outcome. Instead, the two-month program – similar to Leadership Akron – illuminates the agencies, businesses and organizations that make up the fabric of the community. Held over two months, it specifically caters to older adults.
“Leadership Akron opens your eyes to all these things that you did not have a clue about. And I said, that makes sense to do for an older population, as well. Either they’ve already retired or they’re soon to retire or [become] semi-retired,” Talbott explains.
“We don’t say that when you become a member of the program that you need to volunteer with something. All we’re doing is laying the table for you. If something looks inviting, then sample it,” she says.
“We’re matchmakers, in a way. We assume that people know about the civic theater and other landmarks in the community, and they’re wonderful, but there are also other hidden gems in the community that they don’t know about.”
Summit Artspace is one example. “There’s a gallery there, there are young entrepreneurs there, there are old entrepreneurs there. We’ve had folks who’ve connected with them and helped with business plans,” she says.
Isn’t it true that if someone hears about NEXT, then they’re likely to already know about a lot of volunteer opportunities in the Akron area? Sometimes, Talbott says.
“You also have some people who live in Akron but worked in Cleveland. Or somebody might have been involved with the arts during their professional life (but) they never got exposed to healthcare, they never got exposed to education. They never got engaged with parks and the environment. We would take them places and they’d say, ‘Wow, I never knew this existed. Isn’t this great? Tell me more.’”
“If they hear, for example, there’s food insufficiency and you take them somewhere and they see people in line to get food, there’s an imprint on them and they see that this is real; it’s not something they read about in the paper or someone told me about it. They’ve seen it first-hand and you’d be amazed what an impact that has on people,” she adds.
As someone who likes to plan, it makes sense that Talbott was responsible for helping others do the same as they transition out of full-time employment.
“People say, “On X day I’m going to retire. But they don’t think about the day after that: what’s in store for me, what am I supposed to do? Talbott says. “You can be retired but you’re still in charge of your own destiny.”
