Oh my goodness, Edith had her 50th birthday in the eighth season.
I just looked at some clips, and I can see that she’s not very wrinkled, but…but…she has that hair and that dress. Only really old people ever had that hair and that dress, right? (Compounded by the show’s initial run being a little before my time)
I have to second Walter Cronkite. I thought he was the oldest and wisest man on the planet.
Casey Stengel (who was in his mid 70s managing the Mets). And looked it. But as one biographer noted, he was throughout his life often described as old.
Joe Torre is now 75 and looks 20 years younger. But Stengel was known for drinking and smoking while Torre, known for being a fat kid, went on a serious diet around 1970.
Everyone seemed old, and even now I think people looked older “back then”- pretty much whenever back then was. There were a lot of ancient 50 year-olds when I was a kid.
I’m in my mid-30s now and anyone who was my age when I was kid, like movie stars and athletes, looked ancient- and they still look much older than I do now. I find myself watching or looking back at movies when the lead actor was 30 and thinking no way, or realizing I’m the same age as an actor when a certain movie was made or when an athlete retired, and they were always old and broken down.
Back then only Spencer Tracy seemed old. But in black and white tv there were a lot of supporting characters who seemed in their late 50’s, short, wearing wool herringbones, dark rimmed glasses, and bow ties.
During the first 8 years of my life my grandparents lived on the edge of the University of Wisconsin campus on a street that ran parallel to and one block from a row of fraternity sorority houses. I thought those had to be the oldest and smartest people in the world. Now as a 60 year old man I look back and realize just how wrong I was.
Colin Clive was 31 and 35 in the two ‘Frankenstein’ movies.
Heather Locklear, Jane Leeves, and Julia Louise Dreyfus are all 54 years old.
Gladys Cooper was 54 years old when she played the domineering old witch of a mother to Bette Davis, in ‘Now Voyager’. (Ms. Cooper was born in 1888 and was so unnaturally beautiful in her youth, she was employed on the stage since childhood and went on to a long long career on stage and in movies.) Bette herself was 34, I think, in ‘Now Voyager’. She was 31 and looked in her 40’s earlier, in ‘Dark Victory’. I think.
Bart was not conceived until after they graduated. Or rather after Marge graduated. Homer skipped school for several weeks to avoid seeing Marge before the end of school dance so she couldn’t dump him after he lied to her.
According to a later ep, Marge spent time in college in the 90’s before getting knocked up with Bart, while Homer was busy inventing grunge.
Another for the Beatles. For a while I thought they were in their 60s or so in the 60s. Many years later I think I figured it out.
I probably saw the video for Give Peace a Chance (not the Beatles, I know). It’s 1969 so Lennon is about 29, but he looks more like 45 or older. I’m sure when I was a kid seeing it he probably looked even older still. Hell, even Yoko isn’t looking too young there, in my opinion.
I remember Burt Mustin, as Gus the fireman, on Leave It to Beaver, as an old man when I was still in grade school. I was about 26 when he appeared on Phyllis with Judith Lowry.
In fifth grade, I wrote an essay about how impressive it was that Mick Jagger kept on rockin’ despite his advanced age.
It was 1980.
Mick was 37.
ETA: More or less ninja’d by Ellis Aponte, Jr.!
Count me as another person who’s surprised by how young Keeshan was. I just checked and he was 57 when the show ended. If you had asked me, I would have guessed he was in his fifties when he started the show. (His actual age when the show began? 28)
When I was in the younger grades the Grade 8 kids seemed so old and teenaged. Like 16 or so.
Then I got to Grade 8 myself and was like “…they were only 13?”
This isn’t exactly what the OP is asking for, but it’s the story that popped into my mind when I read the thread title, and it is an example of how time/age seems to warp as we get older.
I remember, in my early teens, getting into Led Zeppelin. They were, of course, no longer together, and I remember feeling like I had discovered this old band that most of the kids in my school weren’t into, maybe hadn’t even heard of, for all I knew. I remember distinctly feeling kinda cool being into this ancient band while most of the kids around me were listening to just newer stuff.
It occurred to me many years later, that this would have been around 1984 or so. A full 4 years after this “ancient” band had broken up.
When I discovered porn as a pre-teen I thought the women in those mags and flicks were way older than me. They were women, you know. as a freshmen in college, I saw a playboy centerfold who was a few days younger than myself and it was weird to think that I was now old enough to date the ladies I’d always looked at in Playboy. And now it’s still weird if I look up an old actress from the late 70’s/early 80’s and see that they’re only 10-15 years older than me. I think part of it is that porn shot on film in those days looked way older than it really was. A lot of the stuff I enjoyed in 83 may have been produced in 81 but looked like it was from the 60’s, because of being a 10th generation transfer from betamax to VHS and back again four times.
Lou Holtz. (To be fair, a few years ago I say a NY Jets Monday Night intro from 1976 featuring Lou Holtz and I thought to myself, good cripes, he even looked oldish then.)
Honorable mention to Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson.
George Burns seemed as old as God.
Charles Lane.
He did live to be 102.