Yoga no stretch for 102-year-old longtime Greendale attorney
Charlotte Bleistein kept trying to lower my expectations as we headed to yoga class this week.
“I don’t do a very good job because I can’t get down on the floor,” she warned. “Everybody else can get down on the floor.”
Everybody else isn’t 102 years old.
Emboldened by the idea that this scrappy centenarian signed up for the class, I went along for my very first lesson in the ancient practice. If she can do it, I figured, yoga won’t be a shock to my chakras.
Charlotte performed her poses while sitting on a metal folding chair or standing. The other dozen students and I stretched out on mats on the floor in the fellowship room at Greendale Community Church.
Jamie Mullen, who has the kind of soothing voice and holistic radiance you want in a yoga instructor, gently helped Charlotte into modified poses while telling us all what beautiful and remarkable machines our bodies are.
“It’s inspiring,” Jamie said of Charlotte. “I use her as an example for a lot of my classes.”
The fact that the church is right across the street from Charlotte’s Greendale home was a big plus for her when she signed up for the class last fall. She’s been going weekly ever since, strolling over there with the aid of a wheeled walker.
I’m going to guess that Charlotte doesn’t own leotards or yoga pants. She came to class in a pretty white blouse and comfy blue pants. She moved and stretched with the same determination and serious purpose she brings to everything in life.
“It strengthens your body, doing the exercises,” she said. “I’m in pretty good health for the age I’m at. Very few 102s are as active as I am.”
No argument there. Charlotte also exercises twice a week with the Greendale Senior Social Club, takes mile-long walks, and sticks to a healthy diet light on wheat and sugar.
Yoga past age 100 is just her latest impressive accomplishment. Charlotte graduated from law school in 1939 at Washington University in St. Louis where she grew up. Women lawyers weren’t hired by law firms back then, she said, so she went to work for the National Labor Relations Board and later moved to Greendale and opened her own practice.
In the early 1950s, she built the single-story home where she still lives today, with a sign on the front saying Charlotte A. Bleistein, attorney at law. And I don’t mean she picked the cabinets and colors. A story that ran back then in The Milwaukee Journal has a headline reading, “Lady builds a new home.” She and her neighbor, Dale Johnson, an architectural engineer, literally erected the house, boardby-board and brick-by-brick.
Divorced after a brief marriage, Charlotte raised a daughter as a single mom. She found time, as a self-proclaimed lifelong socialist, to hang out with former Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler and work for progressive causes. Her grandfather, Richard Elsner, was active with the Socialist Party in Milwaukee and served as a Milwaukee judge and state legislator.
Charlotte practiced law and drove a car well into her 90s.
“I keep thinking about these new cars that drive themselves and whether that’s something I want to get into,” she said.
Charlotte never stops learning. After she signed up for yoga, she told fellow student Nancy Krase that she had picked up some books on the subject. “We love the energy she brings to our yoga practice,” Nancy said.
The students in the class span a wide range of ages. The youngest is Kira Bublitz, 30, who is 28 weeks pregnant with her first child. Dave Gaeth, pastor of Greendale Community Church, showed up Tuesday evening so I wasn’t the only man on the mats, which I said I wouldn’t have minded.
And there in the middle of us all was Charlotte — still here, still stretching out, still challenging herself to try something new.