While taking my boat down the inland waterway to Florida a few weeks ago,
I decided to tie up at Georgetown, South Carolina, for the night and visit with an old friend.
As we approached the Esso dock, I saw him through my binoculars standing there awaiting us.
Tall and straight as an arrow he stood, facing a cold,
penetrating wind—truly a picture of a sturdy man,
even though his next birthday will make him eighty-two.
Yes, the man was our elder statesman, Bernard Baruch.
He loaded us into his station wagon and we were off to his famous Hobcaw Barony for dinner.
We sat and talked in the great living room where many notables and statesmen,
including Roosevelt and Churchill, have sat and taken their cues. In his eighty-second year,
still a human dynamo, Mr. Baruch talks not of the past but of present problems and the future,
deploring our ignorance of history, economics, and psychology.
His only reference to the past was to tell me, with a wonderful sparkle in his eye,
that he was only able to get eight quail out of the ten shots the day before.
What is the secret of this great man’s value to the world at eighty-one?
The answer is his insatiable desire to keep being productive.