Photo courtesy Landis Homes
Don and Priscilla Ziegler
Lifelong Students and Teachers
Every morning, Don and Priscilla Ziegler practice coffee meditation, as he likes to call it. Priscilla grinds beans roasted by a fellow Landis Homes resident, a self-taught coffee expert who learned the trade in Africa and installed roasters in his own garage. “Priscilla makes the best coffee in the world,” Don smiles at his wife; she laughs. These are the moments they wake up for—the moments they cherish when they take their mugs to the balcony and watch the sunrise over the woods and fields surrounding their retirement village. They meditate on the idea that these mornings are both transcendent and limited. “Knowing that makes what is here now so much more brilliant and sweet. It’s not morbid to know I’m going to die; it’s a reminder to know how precious this is,” Don says.
Priscilla and Don share that enlightenment around Landis Homes. They teach classes on grief and coping with death, and Priscilla visits the healthcare unit to comfort patients and listen to their stories. In the rest of their time, they not only celebrate life, but they also create it. With several other residents, Don founded Friends of the Woods and Wetlands, a group that works to preserve and revitalize the natural areas around the Landis Homes campus. About five years ago, the retirement village installed six acres of wetlands to restore the flood plain around Kurtz Run. When Friends of the Woods and Wetlands formed two years ago, the group dug out tons of toxic sediment to expose healthy soil that had been trapped for more than 60 years; they planted native plants and groves of pawpaw trees and built hundreds of bee boxes, bluebird boxes, and butterfly gardens. Comprised of about 50 members, the group divides into subcommittees so members can focus on their passions. For example, the bird subcommittee installed boxes that attract native purple martins while the butterfly subcommittee grows plants loved by native monarchs and black swallowtails. “We try to facilitate what people would be interested in, so they can get up out of their chairs and get into this beautiful place—this sanctuary,” Don says.
Even if some residents can’t get out of their chairs, the group finds a way to bring wildlife inside. When Priscilla worked as a first grade teacher, she taught her students about life by keeping a butterfly cage—built by Don—in her classroom to watch the transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. She recalled the children’s wonder when they finally released the butterflies into the wild and has brought that wonder into Landis Homes, where a butterfly cage sits in the main building. Residents who are unable to explore outdoors can still engage with the new butterflies as they grow and when they are released.
Both Priscilla and Don are natural teachers. In fact, after meeting in a college biology class as lab partners, they spent several years teaching English in Belgium, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the West Bank. Don also teaches classes on tree grafting for Pathways Institute for Lifelong Learning, a wide-ranging educational program for community members 55 and older. But the role the couple relishes more than anything is that of grandparents. Each time they visit their three grandchildren in San Diego, they create and publish a memory book. Don is an avid photographer who once focused mostly on nature but has shifted to a focus on his grandchildren. He documents their adventures, Priscilla adds the words, and their grandchildren get to hold their memories in pages forever. The couple also created a treasure hunt for their grandchildren’s last visit as an opportunity for the them to run through campus while their grandparents showed off the wetlands, teaching the need for conservation. “We feel very deeply that we have only a short time here. So, do the right thing, enjoy it, and make it happy. Make it good.”
Photo courtesy Brethren Village
Jessie Eckhart
Aviator, Bowhunter, Trailblazer
Jessie Jones Eckhart has built her story on her walls. Inside her home at Brethren Village hang black and white photos, airplane propellers, paintings, and the mounted head of a 270-pound deer she took with her crossbow last year. They are the tracks of a woman who has not stopped feeding her curious, boundless soul for 94 years. There are photos of her father, Jessie P. Jones, standing in front of his plane, goggles propped atop his head; her mother, Reba, as a young woman raising three daughters; her husband, Howard, standing by the submarine he served on during World War II; and her son parachuting midair. They are the spirits that fill Jessie’s own. “I was just so lucky from the time I was born. The people that dance through my head—I can visit with them anytime I want to,” Jessie says.
That dance begins with her father, who found a living in aviation not long after the Wright Brothers discovered how to engine their gliders. Jessie’s father became a barnstormer, a pilot who would fly into farms in various towns to perform maneuvers and take locals on plane rides. Jessie’s mother led the household, caring for her and her sisters, Helen and Carolyn. “My mom and dad were exceptional parents for that time,” says Jessie, explaining that she and her sisters were taught to rise as whole women guided by love and discipline in a time when men held unequal power.
The worst punishment Jessie recalls was being forced to stay home. She spent every day at the airport except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Sundays. As a budding female pilot during an era when most girls were learning to tend the home, Jessie was far ahead of her time.
She received her student pilot’s permit in high school and completed her first solo flight during her junior year. Many of her friends were attending movies and shopping downtown while Jessie learned the anatomy of engines and wings and how to follow railroads when the compass failed. She pursued an art education degree at Penn State but left upon turning 18 because she knew her passion was geared full throttle on aviation. She returned to Lancaster at the beginning of World War II as her mother began helping to manage the airport owned by her father. Helen, who was four years older, had already received her pilot’s license and worked as an instructor while Jessie studied for the tests to attain her license. Her first job was with a group of Navy cadets, all men older than she, but they exchanged mutual respect, and from there Jessie’s career propelled.
She met her husband, Howard Eckhart, after he served on war submarines. For the first seven years of their marriage, he attended school and began practicing oral surgery while Jessie worked as a flight instructor and held an office job during depressions. They had three sons—Howard, Michael, and David—who were all taught how to fly by their grandfather, each completing their first solo flights on their 16th birthdays. The family bonded over camping, fishing, and vacations around the States. Later, all three sons moved into successful careers as Jessie and Howard flew their planes across the country, spent winters in Florida, took trips with the friends they called “The Anniversary Group” because each of the four couples married in the same year. “I have known such wonderful people in my life. It just seemed like I was at the right place at the right time with the right people—exceptional people,” Jessie recalls.
The grandmother of six took her last solo flight about three years ago but continues to fly dual control with her son Howard. Having learned to hunt small game at the age of 15, she cherishes hunting trips with her twin sons David and Michael. She visits the hangar nearby to watch the planes roll in and out and spends time with friends and her sister Carolyn, who recently moved into the Brethren Village as well; and her three daughters-in-law. “The most important gift is your family,” says the woman who treasures every individual that has passed through her life, who sends and receives more than 250 Christmas cards, and who says, simply, “I am just me. And I am very lucky.”
Photo by Nick Gould, courtesy Cathy Thorn
Cathy and Jim Thorn
Adventurers and Global Influencers
In 2008, Cathy Thorn was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro’s final ascent, several hundred feet away from the summit, when the wind took control of the mountain. It tore apart camps at 60 miles per hour as Cathy focused all her willpower on the next step—not her anxiety over the fact that the porters, the provisions carriers who hiked the mountain for a living, had not even caught up. Cathy was 69 years old. She was in remission from fallopian tube cancer and had only finished chemotherapy six months earlier. This was her second time hiking Africa’s tallest mountain, and despite the cancer, the five below zero temperature, and the dwindling daylight, she was determined to finish.
Cathy and her husband, Jim, said that most of their activity occurred after retirement. They have climbed Peru’s Machu Picchu, completed multiple 200-mile bike rides across Europe, and hiked through the Canadian Rockies and sections of the Appalachian Trail. They take several global trips each year, including trips to the home they own in the Caribbean. At their local dwelling at Willow Valley Communities, Cathy and Jim work out four times each week while taking advantage of the activities and opportunities Willow Valley offers. Plus, the couple travels giving presentations to anyone intrigued by their very non-static lifestyle.
One of those adventures began in 1991 when Cathy and Jim travelled to Africa for the first time. They visited Campi ya Kanzi, an ecolodge on a reserve owned by the Maasai, a tribe attempting to both preserve their 800-year-old, community-rooted culture and to learn to interface with the global economy. Husband and wife founders aimed to bring tourism to the village because that brought the tribe employment, clean water, and venues to sell their handmade arts and crafts. Eventually, the couple also founded a school partially funded by the ecolodge along with outside donations, including donations from the Thorns. Cathy and Jim continue to visit Campi ya Kanzi to interact with the Maasai tribe and help develop the school, whose student body has grown from 36 to more than 700.
Cathy and Jim explain that the tribe is flourishing into a global contributor yet still maintaining its values of family, religion, and land. “They are not poor by their standards,” Cathy says. Jim and Cathy believe this definition of wealth as well, explaining that their life’s prosperity can be measured by their service, adventures, and expansive family comprised of five children, 18 grandchildren, and 26 great-grandchildren. They are grateful for the special villages sprawling the globe and for the special village they know as home in Lancaster.
