Meet the 101-year-old editor who refuses to stop working

Most people retire decades before they turn 100. Eileen Lavine, now 101 and a half years old, still logs on every Wednesday for a virtual editorial meeting at Moment, a publication about Jewish life partly founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. She has held the senior editor role since 2008 and continues to copy edit original content for typos and errors, work she has no plans of giving up.

Lavine’s journalism career began at the University of Wisconsin, where she left New York at just 16 to attend college. She reported for the Daily Cardinal and became the first woman to serve a full term as its editor, before earning a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Over the decades that followed, she reported for newspapers in Massachusetts, worked at The New York Times, wrote radio scripts, worked in public relations, and served as an editor for Better Times.

In 1962, Lavine noticed that friends kept asking her to edit and proofread their writing. So she and seven others each chipped in $50 to start a company called Information Services, taking on freelance writing and editing work for nonprofits that could not afford full-time staff, including pathology societies, the National Cancer Institute, and the Department of Education. The company no longer exists, but Lavine never stopped working.

Asked how she has stayed sharp, Lavine told TODAY.com, ‘I’m not an athlete. I’ve got it up here.’ She uses a walker, does not swim, and only occasionally walks around the block, but her mind, she says, is where her real strength lies. She pointed out that at her assisted living complex, ‘there are people here who forget what they had for breakfast’ — a contrast she attributes to keeping her brain consistently engaged.

That engagement follows a strict daily pattern. Every morning in the apartment where she lives alone, Lavine eats Raisin Bran, orange juice, bread with cream cheese and jelly, and coffee, before reading the day’s editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post, both delivered to her door. She then works through the week’s New Yorker, completes its crossword, checks her Substack newsletters, and reads ProPublica, the Columbia Journalism Review, and The Hill.

Lavine’s mother taught her to ‘look on the best side of things all the time and to really feel that you’re making a contribution,’ a philosophy she credits for her decades of continued work. She wrote her memoir, ‘A Medley of Extemporanea,’ in 2022 at age 97, naming it after a line from a Dorothy Parker poem that also inspired her college newspaper column decades earlier. In its epilogue, she wrote, ‘It’s been amazing to look back on it all.’

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by Nenad Stojkovic (representative image)