kindness
A 92-year-old still plays softball, and they call her Mom
She almost stayed home. Then she hit her first home run.
The Colorado Peaches, a women's softball team where the youngest player is 60 and the oldest is 92, marked 35 years on the field this season in Lakewood. Barbara Johnson, 92, still turns up on Tuesday mornings in peach-colored sneakers, bat in hand. Her teammates call her Mom. She grounded out on the day KUNC visited, couldn't quite reach first in time, and said, "Ah, shucks." The team formed in 1991 to keep older women moving and connected. Around a quarter of Colorado residents will be over 60 within a few years, and researchers link social isolation to dementia and heart disease. Laura Clemons, 77, has leukemia and nearly skipped a recent morning for lack of energy. She went anyway, and hit her first home run. "I don't know where I would be without them right now," she said. Johnson wears number 24 and plans to keep swinging. "It's up to me to keep doing it."