Success Stories - Never Too Old, Never Too Late - Late Bloomers Dreams and Achievements

Success stories can be achieved at any age.As we live longer and longer, the ages between 50 and 80 is becoming a time for reinventing ourselves, pursuing our dreams and coming into our own terms of self understanding.  Around the age of 50, people are discovering a renewed creativity. Empowered by  greater life experiences, an inner freedom, and better confidence, many people are able to blossom. The years have enabled them to turn their long delayed seeds of ideas into a garden of dreams.

One of the oldest success stories is The owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Harlan David Sanders, well known as Colonel Sanders. He was 65 years old when he started Kentucy Fried Chicken. Kentucky Fried Chicken was a brand new business idea for him. In his youth, Sanders worked many different jobs from farming to steamboat pilot, to insurance salesman. When he turned 40 years old, he started a service station and sold chicken dinners to his patrons. Over a number of years he developing the way he pressure fried the chicken. As the demand for his special chicken grew, he opened a restaurant. As fate would have it, a major interstate was built, which diverted traffic away from the road his restaurant was on. Sanders decided to franchise his business and Kentucky Fried Chicken was born.

McDonalds was started by Ray Kroc, when most people his age were retiring.  Ray Kroc was 52 years old in 1954. He was a milk shake machine salesman. One day he happened on a hamburger stand in San Bernandino, California and instead of selling the McDonald brothers his machine, he bought the business the rest is one of the greatest success stories. Ray Kroc became a pioneer in the fast food industry. He started a uniform system of production for the hamburgers, milk shakes, and french fries, so that the food tasted the same in each of the franchises throughout the country and eventually the world.  In 1960, Kroc had more than 200 McDonald franchises in the U.S., but he barely earned a profit. He started to prosper when he started the Franchise Realty Corporation which bought up property and leased it to franchisees. With the profits from real estate, Kroc started advertising to support the franchises, and expanded in the 1970’s across the globe. From creating an assembly line food production to welcoming ideas from his franchisees, McDonald’s has known great success and is often a model for other fast food establishments. Kroc went on to accumulate  $500 million dollars in assets.  

Wallace Amos, Jr. started his  Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookie Company in 1975, when he was 41 years old.  Amos lived with his Aunt Della after his parents divorced, when he was very young. His Aunt baked delicious homemade chocolate chip and pecan cookies. This motivated Amos to enroll in the Food Trades Vocational High School to study culinary arts for 2 years. Afterwards he joined the Air Force for 4 years. When he returned back to his home in New York, he worked as a stock boy at Saks 5th Ave and then in the mailroom at the William Morris Talent Agency. He moved up the ladder and became the very first African American talent agent in the company. It is Wally Amos who discovered the singing careers of Simon and Garfunkel. Amos went on to work with Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, and Sam Cook.  Years later Amos moved to Los Angeles, California to set up his own talent agency. But it failed and he struggled to get out of debt and re establish himself in business. With little else to do, he started to find comfort in baking chocolate chip cookies. His success story begins. Amos adjusted his Aunt’s recipe and opened his first cookie store in 1975.  He started franchising his cookie ideas and it became a great success coast to coast.  But in 1985, due to mismanagement he had to sell off pieces of his company, which was bought by The Shansby Group. Amos tried to start another cookie company named Wally Amos Presents Chip and Cookie, but was forced to cease production from a lawsuit filed by The Shansby Group.   Famous Amos brand cookies have been owned by the Keebler Company since 1998. Amos became the spokesman for the cookie product.

No matter what card game you play, it is due to Edmond Hoyle. He was the first to write down and copyright the details of the rules of many card games, chess, backgammon, and other games of his time period. His claim to fame in card game rules came about when he was 70 years old. Hoyle’s name appears on hundreds of books.

Laura Ingalls Wilder became a journalist in her forties, and was 65 years old when she started writing the Little House on the Prarie series.

Wallace Stevens won a Pulitzer Prize for his “Collected Poems” he wrote. He was 76 years old.

Raymond Chandler was 45 when his detective story “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” was first published in a magazine. He was 51 years old when his first novel The Big Sleep was published.

Grandma Moses began painting at age 75

If you have heard of the novel Ben Hur, you have heard of Lew Wallace. He was 53 years old and it became the best selling novel in the 19th century, it has never been out of print.
At the age of 51 he became the New Mexico Territory govenor, from 1878-1881. He was very busy as govenor. He tried to make a deal with Billy the Kid to become an informant, by pardoning him of his crimes, but it didn’t work. It was also while he was govenor that he wrote Ben Hur.

As a young man, John William Corrington became an English professor after he graduated college. He and his wife wrote several screen plays for movies, including Battle for the Planet of the Apes. When Corrington was 43, he graduated law school. But after practicing for a few years, at the age of 46 he and his wife became head writers for several soap operas including Search for Tomorrow, General Hospital, Capitol, and several other daytime shows.

Tim Zagat of the restaurant guide fame, was 44 years old when he started the Zagat Restaurant Guide. When he was 51 years old in 1986, when he left his job as a coporate lawyer for Gulf and Western Corporation. Both Tim and Nina were Yale University Law School graduates. His wife, Nina of the same age, soon left her job as a lawyer to join the company and work with her husband.

At 70 years old, Golda Meir became the 4th prime minister of Israel. At the age of 49, she was Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. She was born in Russia, but raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She became the foreign minister of Israel at age 55, and retired at age 66, but came out of retirement at 70 and served for 4 years, to become the first female head of the country.

The average age of the men who have served as president of the United States is 54 years and 11 months. The youngest was Teddy Roosevelt, age 42, the oldest, Ronald Regan, who became President 16 days before his 70th birthday.

Carolyn McCarthy became a U.S. Congresswoman for the first time at the age of 56 to advocate for gun control after her husband was killed and her son injured in a random train shooting.

Nelson Mandela became the oldest elected president of South Africa in 1994, when he was 74 years old. Prior to this, he was imprisioned for life, anti apartheid activity. He was released after 27 years in 1990, and led his party towards a multi racial democracy.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer survived WWII by being sent to a Switzerland orphanage by her parents who stayed behind in Germany, and were met by the hands of the Nazis..  She trained to be a psychologist in France in the 1950’s and emigrated to the U.S. She continued her post doctoral education in human sexuality. At 53, she became a household name across the country, for her late night radio call in show fielding questions as a psychosexual therapist. As of 2009, at the age of 81, she was still teaching a few courses at Yale University.

Peter Mark Roget was born in 1779. He was a British doctor was i influencial in the techonology of motion pictures. He was forced to retire, but at the age of 73, published a famous book we still used today. He is best known for Roget’s Thesaurus, first known as “Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition”. His book has never been out of print since it was published in 1852.

At the age of 47, Sir Alexander Fleming, a British doctor and scientist specializing in studying bacteria discovered penicillin. Years later in 1941, at the age of 43, Howard Florey purified and tested the penicillin vaccine. Ernest Chain was 39, when he created the 1st large scale production plant to produce penicillin. By 1945, penicillin became commercially available. In 1945, all three men were awarded the Nobel Prize, Fleming was 64, Florey was 47, and Chain was 39.

Believe it or not, the oldest Olympic champion won his 1st and 2nd gold medal when he was 60 years old in 1908 in the deer shooting competition (no deer are actually hurt). He returned to the Olympics in 1912 and won another gold medal. In 1920, he returned again to the Olympics, and won the silver medal, holding the record as the oldest medalist in the Olympics.

Ben Franklin could also be considered a late bloomer, although he had done so much in his early life too and has many success stories. Throughout his years he continued to expand on his genius. He was 46 years old when he experimented with electricity using his kite. At 47, he won the Copley Award, an early version of the Nobel Prize. When he was 47 to 49 years old, he invented bifocals, the catheter, and the Franklin Stove. He was elected to the Continental Congress at age 69. At 70 he signed the Declaration of Independence, making him the oldest signer. When he was 77 years old, he negotiated the Treaty of Paris, which put an end to the Revolutionary War. At 81, he signed the U.S.Constitution.

Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile when he was 45 years old. At the age of 60, he created the first car assembly line.

Charles Darwin wrote the Origins of Species whe he was 50 years old through his years of observing nature.

The Japanese businessman Momofuke Ando at the age of 48 invented instant Ramen Noodles with his company, Nissin Foods, which he started 10 years before. Over the years it grew to be a multimillion dollar food company built on dried, fried noodles that he sold in plastic square formed noodles and foam cups. In 2005, his instant noodles were taken aboard thd Discovery shuttle. Over 100 million people per day eat these products. In 2006, Cup Noodles introduced in 1971 was used by 25 billion people across the globe.

The inventor of the Taser, Jack Cover, was a nuclear physicist. He worked in the aerospace and defense industry supplying parts for the Apollo project run by NASA.
He was 50 years old when he started his company, Taser, Inc. in 1970.  In 1974, he received a patent for his invention which was designed to disable an assailant without using a nonlethal weapon. Today, more than 13,000 law enforcement organizations worldwide, use the Taser.  

Soichiro Hondawas 42 years old when he formed the Honda Motor Company in 1948. He created the motorbike by attaching a small engine to a bicycle This success led him to designing a small motorcycle and within 10 years of starting Honda,  he was the leading motorcycle manufacturer in the world. He started manufacturing small engines and cars  and the rest is history. In 1988, at the age of 82, he was the 1st Japanese automobile manufacturer to be included in the Automobile Hall of Fame.  

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. ~Mark Twain
A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams. ~John Barrymore
At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; at 40 the judgment. ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac
The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth. ~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. -Oliver Wendell Holmes

In some cases, you might think it is too late to pursue your dreams. If you listen to others you can be easily influenced by people who say you are too old to start your own business, to be a writer, or to invent the next great thing. People don't know you. They probably don't know anything about you. They may not share your dreams. If you wait for permission from someone else you might miss opportunities. You know what you are capable of doing. A little fear is fine. But you can go ahead and take those steps towards what you have always wanted to do. The ordinary and the great among us, don't have to be bound by the barrier of age. These “over the hill” success stories are just some of the many people who succeeding in pursuing their dreams later in life. With the right determination, attitude, and some luck you can see these people are no different than anyone of us. If you are young, have patience, you have a lot to look forward to achieving. If you are older, go for it, knowing today is your day and just maybe we will see you at the top.