Think you know Lauren Ritchie?

Ritchie: Getting older is changing the viewpoint of this columnist.

Getting older at the Ritchie Resort and Sunshine Sanitarium means becoming soooo less impressed with “important” people.

Celebrities, politicians, preachers and the like are all fine and dandy, but the real heroes are elsewhere. Look down that food chain.

Highlighting some of those folks in 2020 is going to be part of your local columnist’s goal as a new year of commentary opens here at the Orlando Sentinel.

Each January, my colleague Scott Maxwell and I disclose our finances and politics and tell you a little about our families — all the things that affect our outlook and viewpoint when we adopt opinions and write columns.

This year, age is starting to play a part in factors that affect viewpoint. Your columnist is 62, three years from the security that government-funded health care gives to retirement, which is viewed here at the Sanitarium as a chance to do more community work.

Some people manage to do it without actually having time in their lives. Take Gretchen Sommer, a teacher at Round Lake Elementary in Mount Dora and the mother of four children. She started a fundraising effort for the Triangle Wrestling Club that developed into a Christmas campaign to help the elderly. As if she had nothing else to do with her “free” time. The result wasn’t just help for older folks but a life lesson for the kids involved who need to be shown that the strength of a community is in its people and their commitment to one another. The force behind such lessons is a person with noble intentions and a

sense of how to build community in a world where people don’t seem very connected to one another personally, thanks in part to technology.

So, while actress Angelina Jolie donates millions for causes ranging from AIDS to orphans internationally, the Sommerses of the world are building communities like Sorrento from the ground up. That’s good for us here in Central Florida.

That rather old-fashioned outlook probably comes from a sparse upbringing backstopped by family that never would allow a misstep or bad luck to result in homelessness or hunger.

Your columnist was the only child of a steelworker and homemaker outside Pittsburgh along the Ohio River. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, families could get along with just one income, and the mom usually stayed home, as mine did.

International travel was a great novelty, families had one car and nobody’s sneakers cost a week’s worth of pay. Simply put, people wanted less. A decade out of World War II, the generation that fought was still focused on getting a decent job, buying a home and living quietly as the U.S. economy continued to roar.

Then came the civil rights era, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s resignation from office, prompted by investigative journalism into the burglary on behalf of the president.

Well before that last event, your columnist knew she wanted to be a news reporter. After high school, I was lucky enough to be offered a full scholarship to Ohio University, a good journalism school, but my preference was to get into Northwestern University, the premier school at the time. Image the surprise of my parents when this 17-year-old without a nickel to her name announced she’d be turning down that full scholarship and going to the school in Chicagoland, even though the acceptance was for the college of arts and sciences, not the more elite journalism school.

‘You give me that spot,’ I thought at the time. ‘I’ll be in that journalism school before long.’ Indeed, it took only one semester of banging on the dean’s door and begging.

Since graduating with a bachelor of science degree in 1979, my income source always has been from newspapers — mostly the Sentinel where I started 40 years ago in July as a reporter in the Lake County bureau.

Today, I also get a bit of a pension from what used to be the Tribune Company before it split into two new firms, along with whatever I clear from renting what was my late father’s bungalow on the 5 acres I own in the rural community of Lake Jem, on the border with north Orange County.

This year, that last-mentioned income was, well, almost nil. A renter with five indoor cats and no litter boxes did $8,000 worth of damage and pretty well wiped out any profit. It taught this old girl a hard lesson in how to be a landlord while trying to save for retirement. A local money manager controls my main retirement fund, which is independent of the Sentinel, and the paper’s 401(K), to which they contribute a maximum of 4% of an employee’s salary, is invested through the Vanguard company of funds. I look at it maybe once every couple years.

I drive a 9-year-old Chevrolet Cruze with a stick shift and about 140,000 miles on it. Sometimes I drive my Big Boy, Toro’s largest commercial-grade, zeroturn mower with whom I have a close personal relationship.

I own a firearm and a dog. I won’t be giving up either for any reason. Lola, a grouchy schoolmarm with an intense herding instinct and a dislike of children (unless they are well roasted with gravy) turned 12 last week — that’s 84 in dog years — and her fuzzy self is laying on my foot at the moment where I captain the “LakeFront” column from my stressless chair. My politics are middle of the road, and I’m registered to vote as a Republican, though I’m beginning to see the advantage to being independent. I feel like both major parties have left me behind.

I knit (badly) and scrapbook (rather well, if I say so myself ) and volunteer time with Forward Paths, a Leesburg nonprofit run by a unsung saint who tries to help young people from 17 to 24 who are homeless and can’t quite nail this adulting thing.

Which brings us back to what ordinary people do for their community that makes them so extraordinary. So, here we go. Hop aboard.