Average Age

On Monday, a little-noticed federal panel, the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, will release preliminary recommendations on how the government can limit the runaway growth of entitlement spending. However worthy the goals of the commission may be, the age and background of its members jeopardize its ability to produce meaningful or significant reforms.

Miriam Hasen could go to a funeral every month, if she wanted to keep up with all the memorial notices for her neighbors in Leisure Village. She doesn't. Instead, she regularly steps into the neighborhood Recreation Center, social hub of the roughly 3,700 residents who make up Ventura County's largest retirement community. It was there one recent morning that Hasen mounted the stage. She took a breath.

They might be old, but they can still swing. The Harmony Headliners big band celebrates its 10th anniversary Thursday, which is no small accomplishment when you consider that the average age of the players is about 70, and that one of them once gave a banjo concert for Calvin Coolidge. "Did I think we would last 10 years? Well, to tell you the truth, I never gave it a thought," said 73-year-old Lew Bregen, Headliners emcee and one of the band's two vocalists. "I had no idea where it would go.

Herbert and Florence Friedman weren't sure of the response they would receive when they started a group called the Nifty Fifties at Leisure World, in Laguna Hills, early last year. In a community where the average age is 76 and an estimated 17 residents are over 100, the Friedmans and some of their peers believed that the younger set needed a group of its own to arrange social activities, such as dances and dinners.

Detective Hector Camacho keeps a Polaroid photograph that he pulls from a desk drawer when he wants to make a point. The faded picture depicts a small, friendly looking 11-year-old boy. He is wearing a baggy, blue T-shirt that hangs on his thin shoulders, a pair of blue jeans stained at the knees, tennis shoes and an engaging smile. His hair is slightly tousled. The youngster could have been thinking about Little League.