9 Over 90: Part Three

Below is the third installment of our “9 Over 90” series in which Baltimore nonagenarians share their stories, challenges, and wisdom. Check out Part One and Part Two from earlier this week.

Dr. Warren C. Hayman

D.O.B.: October 1, 1932; Baltimore, MD

Education:

Coppin State University, B.S.

Stanford University, M.A.

Harvard University, Ed.D.

Military Service:

U.S. Army, 1955-1957

Career, Present and Past

It took weeks to land an interview with lifetime educator Dr. Warren Hayman. “I just finished co-chairing with Bob Wade the Baltimore City Public Schools Basketball Academy,” he says. That three-day event recently celebrated its 25^th year with 150 middle school students and eight high school basketball teams. “I coordinate the academic component,” he explains. For students from the greater Baltimore area, the daily morning portion includes workshops on SAT prep, rites of passage, college admissions, and health and wellness.

After the event was over, Hayman returned to his work as chair of the Ken Haskins legacy project. “He was instrumental in my getting to Harvard and receiving a Rockefeller Foundation grant,” Hayman explains, adding that he has written papers and worked on a documentary about Haskins, the Harvard educator. 

Hayman juggles many projects at once. He chairs the advisory board for the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. In the 1980s he helped to create the Hopkins Dunbar High School Health Partnership, which continues to introduce students to resources and mentors in the fields of medicine and science.  At Morgan State University, from which he officially retired at age 88, he chairs some dissertation committees and serves on others in the Urban Educational Leadership program. 

A Coppin State University Hall of Fame honors student and basketball player, Hayman is now board chair of the Cloverdale AC Baltimore Basketball Association, chair of the education committee for 100 Black Men of Maryland and part of the Baltimore Oldtimers, an organization of retired athletes who fundraise for scholarships and other causes. 

In between community work, Hayman is writing a memoir about his life from birth in the close-knit Sandtown community (where a portion of Moser Street now bears his name), to becoming an elementary school teacher in Baltimore, receiving advanced degrees from Stanford and Harvard and becoming superintendent of the Ravenswood School district in East Palo Alto, CA. He was the fifth Black school superintendent in California, where he, his wife and three children lived for 13 years before returning to Baltimore as dean of the School of Education at Coppin. 

Hayman then went on to Morgan State University as Vice President of Student Affairs, Assistant Dean of Education, and finally coordinator of the Urban Educational Leadership doctoral program before retiring in 2021. “I say I’ve retired three times.” But it’s clear he’s never stopped working to help others.  

He stays in touch with dozens of past students and their children. “My legacy is to help people. People helped me. I feel obligated to help others. God has given me certain abilities that I must use to lift as I climb.”

Key to Longevity of Involvement: “Commitment, commitment to my personal endeavors. My own conceptual framework is awareness, commitment and implementation. I use that, and I use it in professional development presentations as well.” 

Current challenge:  Prioritizing the work…. I need to learn to stay in my lane. I get pulled in various and sundry places and put my memoir on hold. Every time I say I’m going to stop doing A & B, they say, ‘You can’t quit. We need you.’ I need to determine what is first and second in what I am trying to create.

To that end Hayman wears a FitBit® on his morning walks, before he goes to the computer to work all day, and to tell him it’s 10 p.m., time to stop watching sports on television and go to sleep. “That doesn’t mean I do it,” he laughs.

Jane W. Daniels

D.O.B. July 25, 1928; Baltimore, MD

Education: 

B.A. Goucher College

B.S. Simmons College

Career Present and Past:

When asked about her current pursuit, “Living!” exclaims the vibrant Jane Daniels, long active in Baltimore City and national non-profits. At 94, she lives independently in the Roland Park house where she’s lived for 57 years and where she and her late husband Worth raised their children. “My two daughters are my greatest accomplishment,” she says.

Daniels is an avid reader. A former trustee of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, as well as a former librarian there and at the Baltimore County Public Library, she stays current on recent releases despite vision difficulties. Next to her sits a box containing a new reading lamp and a copy of John Irving’s latest novel, The Chairlift. She just finished Lessons in Chemistry and the newest Louise Penney. Books line a nearby shelf, ready to distribute to friends.

“I belong to the Hamilton Street Club, which is a great plus in my life. They have a wonderful program committee. Next Saturday is a Zoom trip to Paris. I play bridge twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. Fridays we meet here. We play morning and afternoon, and at lunch, we discuss what’s going on in the world. We have a great group. Several of us are over 90, including my sister, who is over 95. Our youngest member is in her late 70s.” She pauses. “Dinner times are a little lonely.” 

But some of the same women, plus others, gather for cocktail hour by Zoom once a week. Her daughters also each come once a week for dinner. Her three granddaughters visit regularly.

Daniels is still in touch with some of the weavers she met when she was active in the Weavers Guild of Greater Baltimore. She did every workshop locally and traveled biannually throughout the country for national conferences. “I made clothes, upholstery, table linens, tapestries.” She wove up into her 90s and still has her looms. For her alma mater Roland Park Country School, where she has served as a trustee, she commissioned the Centennial Tapestry that has hung in the school library since 2001.

She continues a longtime involvement with the Southern Poverty Law Center because she says, “They are very, very important and keep track of all hate groups and take them to court when necessary.” The Partnership with Native Americans and the Red Cloud Indian School also remain important to her. “And locally, there’s so much need: fuel, homelessness, housing, food shortage.”  

Before her husband Worth’s death in 2009, the couple established at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine the Interprofessional Education Initiative, now known as The Daniels Initiative. “John Burton and Worth were into gerontology many years ago, before it became so important. They were concerned about those who didn’t have the means or a family to help them, people who depended solely on their doctors, nurses and pharmacists. With the Schools of Medicine and Nursing at Hopkins and Notre Dame of Maryland’s School of Pharmacy, we set up a program where professionals would get together, discuss what they were doing and how they could work together for the patient.”

Key to longevity of engagement: Good genes. My sister and I are both in our 90s. I’ve never tried anything special. I do things to keep my mind active: jigsaw puzzles, reading, bridge. It would be difficult to be solitary. I interact with others as much as possible. Zoom has been a wonderful thing for the elderly. (I don’t like that term.) That’s very important. My point of view is, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Current Challenge: The daily challenges of living, as my eyes are going bad, and I no longer drive. 

James R. Grieves, FAIA

D.O.B. June 27, 1932; Baltimore, MD

Education: 

University of Virginia, B.S.

Princeton University, M.F.A.

Career, Present and Past:

“I never retired from architecture. It started when I was 12 years old, when I redesigned our house on University Parkway. This is what I do. It’s a natural thing,” says the humble but renowned architect who, with his wife Anne, moved six years ago from Charles Street to the Blakehurst retirement community. Grieves officially retired in 1998, but he’s never stopped working as an architect. A former All-American lacrosse player, coach and Greater Baltimore Lacrosse Foundation president, he’s also never stopped exercising or working out each morning.

Grieves’s most recent institutional project is the Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory for Washington College in Chestertown that is slated to begin construction in fall 2023. For a Western Run private estate Tashiding, on which he has worked since 1999, Grieves’s most recent project was for the owners’ grandchildren: an elaborate, multi-stored tree house the size of an outbuilding. A redesign of the aviary is now under discussion.

On a table in his apartment sits a thick black notebook of photographs, newspaper articles and citations that speak to the creativity and scope of Jim Grieves’s work. In Maryland and throughout the United States, he has designed award-winning buildings at universities, theaters, museums, clubs, secondary schools, shopping centers, condominium complexes and private homes. His career began at Baltimore and Princeton, NJ architecture firms before he joined RTKL (which did much work for the Rouse Company) and then started his own firm, James R. Grieves Associates. In 1990 his firm merged with others to become Grieves, Worrall, Wright and O’Hatnick (GWWO).  

For the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art in Delaware, Grieves worked on three major projects over 50 years. Other notable institutions include Baltimore Center Stage, the Walters Art Museum, the Johns Hopkins University, the National Aquarium, Bowdoin College, St. Paul’s School, Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre and Alexander Hall, a visitors’ center at Everglades National Park, and two visitors’ centers at Mount Vernon in Virginia. From Nantucket to Hawaii and throughout Maryland, more than 50 private residences show the creative talent of this preservationist with a contemporary twist.

Key to Longevity of Involvement: “Love. Love of what I do. I love to design. I’ve been doing it since I was a boy,” he says while sitting in his redesigned, modern apartment at Blakehurst. His office there includes a counter, where he stands to work at his drafting board. Grieves does renderings the old-fashioned way, by hand. “The hard part is trying to explain the three dimensions. Computers can walk someone through a building… That’s why I do models.”

Current challenge: Speaking from a thoroughly engaged point of view, Grieves says, “Meeting the budget. We have a hard time knowing what things are going to cost. The prices of lumber and steel change monthly.”