Aged

Kang Il-chul rides in the back of a van packed with gossiping old women. The 82-year-old girlishly covers her mouth to whisper a secret. "We argue a lot about the food," she says, wrinkling her nose. "To tell you the truth, some of these old ladies are grouchy." There are eight of them, sharing a hillside home on the outskirts of Seoul, sparring over everything from territory to room temperature. Some wear makeup and stylish hats; others are happy in robes and slippers.

For three decades China's one-child policy helped power this nation's economic rise. With fewer mouths to feed, families saved. Poverty fell. Living standards improved. But a social experiment that worked well in some respects is now threatening the country's hard-won gains. China's working-age population -- the engine behind its prolific growth -- will start shrinking within a few years. Meanwhile, the ranks of elderly are projected to soar.

Sitting in a bare cubicle, with her reading glasses perched halfway down her nose and typing away on a laptop she'd brought from home, Lois Draegin looked a bit like the extra adult wedged in at the kids' table at Thanksgiving. This accomplished magazine editor lost her six-figure job at TV Guide last spring and is now, at 55, an unpaid intern at wowOwow.com, a fledgling website with columns and stories that target accomplished women older than 40.

Phoebe Hearst Cooke is a noted horsewoman and philanthropist. She owns two ranches in San Luis Obispo County, and with assets between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, she is a fixture on the Forbes list of America's wealthiest people. She also is at the center of legal actions filed by relatives who contend the 81-year-old granddaughter of publishing legend William Randolph Hearst no longer has the capacity to manage her own affairs.

Their savings in shambles from the economic downturn, jobless seniors are dusting off their briefcases and trying to head back to work. Many, like Jim Mitchell, a 63-year-old former sales executive, are finding a merciless job market where decades of experience aren't necessarily an asset. The Long Beach resident rises daily before dawn and dresses neatly in business attire to keep himself motivated.

In their rough South Los Angeles neighborhood, Mary Romer and Alma Harvey watched over each other. So back in February 1990, Romer didn't think twice about walking across the street to Harvey's home when another friend called. They were concerned because they had not heard from the 82-year-old, who had trouble walking and was mostly housebound. Romer used a spare key to enter the house. As she crept inside, she called for her friend, but there was no answer.

Like the other old men at this Costa Mesa boatyard, where the hulls of peeling sloops and half-made cutters rot on their wooden posts, Karl Markvart can't be certain he'll live long enough to reach the water. Again and again, he's watched the boat builders around him lose their race to the sea, their unfinished vessels hauled off to the junkyard to make room for another boat, another mad dreamer.

Yvonne Dutton's life was saved by a department store. When she was raising eight children on a meager budget supplemented by food stamps, the Huntington Beach woman didn't have the time or money to shop at Nordstrom. And things got even worse when her 37-year marriage ended in divorce. It was a time when most of her peers were contemplating their leisure years, yet Dutton found herself looking for a new career at age 60. It wasn't long before she found Nordstrom.

In his dreams, Tu Tongjin is back on the battlefield, a terror-stricken young medic wandering the Chinese countryside with Mao Tse-tung and his fledgling Red Army. He is marching again, always marching. All around him are the bodies, including those of the 40,000 killed in one battle alone. He's starving, eating only grass. He feels the nagging cold and desperation of being hounded by death and pursued by a relentless enemy army. "What I remember most," the 94-year-old says, "is the chaos."

A woman accused of setting a fire that destroyed six trailers, rendered eight families homeless and resulted in the evacuation of a notorious mobile home park in Thermal was acquitted on all charges Friday by a jury in Indio. An emotional Guadalupe DeAnda, 52, sobbed uncontrollably as the verdict was read, said her lawyer, public defender David Prendergast. The case went to the jury Thursday.