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The Tom Brady of Other Jobs

Meet the people as old in their jobs as Tom Brady is in his: the oldest 1 percent of the work force, across a range of professions.

N.F.L. quarterback 45 years old
Paramedic 70 years old
Biologist 72 years old
Dancer 76 years old
Logger 82 years old
Baker 83 years old
Tour guide 84 years old
Doctor 85 years old
Composer 88 years old
Artist 95 years old

In the National Football League, Tom Brady is a very old man.

When he takes the field Sunday night — with his Tampa Bay Buccaneers still hoping to make the postseason — he will be 45.4 years old, six years older than the next-oldest starter in the N.F.L. and the oldest starting quarterback in the league for the seventh season in a row.

In a league where most quarterbacks last about four seasons, Mr. Brady is in his 23rd. It is safe to call him the top 1 percent in terms of age for starting quarterbacks, or even the top 0.1 percent. He is, himself, the end of the distribution.

Age distribution of starting N.F.L. quarterbacks
Age 20304050607080908% 28Median age 45Tom
Source: Pro Football Reference; Accounts for starting quarterbacks from 1970-2022

There are many ways to contemplate Mr. Brady’s age, but the best one may be to look outside the sports arena, comparing him with aging workers still going strong in other professions.

Starting at quarterback at 45 is akin to being a family doctor well into his ninth decade. It’s like being an emergency medical technician — a job that requires running up stairs and lifting bodies on stretchers — at age 70. Or an artist in her 90s, a logger in his 80s or a biologist in her 70s.

We know this because the Census Bureau publishes detailed data about the composition of the American workforce, including age and occupation. Using this information, we set out to find a group of American workers who occupy the same part of the age distribution in their professions as Mr. Brady does in his.

We found nine such people from around the United States, and we asked them why, like Mr. Brady, they can’t seem to quit.

Of course, there is no such thing as a Super Bowl of baking, or an All-Pro team of the country’s logging foremen. There is no Most Valuable Bean Biologist award, though perhaps there should be. We do not claim that these workers are the greatest of all time at what they do. On the other hand, having talked extensively with them, we cannot rule it out.

Meet them, and decide for yourself:

The Tom Brady of Paramedics Jesse Izaguirre, 70

Gardena, Calif.

Jesse Izaguirre loves working with younger paramedics. Who else would teach him about “these newfangled phones?” Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times

Jesse Izaguirre is a reformed ambulance chaser.

Age distribution of male E.M.T.s and paramedics
Age 20304050607080904% 33Median age 70Jesse
Remaining age distributions are from the American Community Survey via IPUMS.

In the 1970s, he made $5 a pop following ambulances and selling pictures of accident scenes to a local paper in California’s Central Valley. One day, the ambulance company called him up — and offered him a job. In more than four decades since, he’s done everything: put in IVs, intubated patients, and even delivered babies (10 total).

These days, he works two 24-hour shifts each week transporting patients in Los Angeles County. He bounces in and out of the ambulance. By his account, which The New York Times could not independently verify, nurses guess he’s in his 50s. All the slowing down he’ll admit to is that he loves to nap on shift.

Jesse Izaguirre poses for a self-portrait in his rookie year, 1975.

“Some people ask, ‘When are you going to retire?’” he said. “I say, ‘First of all, it’s none of your darn business.’” He laughed. “I’m kidding. I’ll tell them anything. When am I going to retire? Hopefully never.”

The Tom Brady of Bakers Helen Fletcher, 83

Clayton, Mo.

Helen Fletcher’s job keeps her busy and active. She lifts heavy trays down to the oven and back up to the counter, even in her ninth decade. Whitney Curtis for The New York Times

Helen Fletcher got her dream job in her 70s: in-house pastry chef for Tony’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in the St. Louis area. Now 83, she rises before dawn to make cheesecakes, tarts, biscotti, tiramisù.

Age distribution of female bakers
Age 20304050607080903% 38Median age 83Helen

“My mother died from complications of Alzheimer’s, and my brother was just diagnosed with it,” Ms. Fletcher said. “It’s extremely important for me to keep my mind and my body going.”

Before Tony’s, she ran her own wholesale bakery, which she opened in middle age. When not baking, she writes prolifically — filling cookbook after cookbook — and she’s a popular guest on local television, with thick white hair and a camera-ready smirk.

Behind the scenes, it can be messier. Professional baking is an exacting job, she says. Consistency is paramount. There’s no wiggle room. And there’s the occasional cake implosion.

“You always have disasters,” she said. “Anyone who’s been in the business for this many years and says they’ve never had a disaster? Chalk it up to a great big fib.”

The Tom Brady of Artists Lilian Thomas Burwell, 95

Highland Beach, Md.

For Lilian Thomas Burwell, life’s mysteries delight as much at age 95 as they did in childhood. “When I get to that point where I have all the answers, then the only thing I need to know how to do is make a really good-looking coffin.” Lexey Swall for The New York Times

Lilian Burwell recently had an exhibition in New York that drew so much attention that, as she puts it, she’s been making “real money.”

“I can’t keep up with myself anymore!” she said.

At 95, that’s how so many things in her life feel, including her art: still new, after all this time.

“It’s like it comes through me,” she said. “Not from me.”

Age distribution of female artists
Age 20304050607080902.5% 43Median age 95Lilian

She knew as a child in New York City during the Great Depression that she had to follow her instinct to create art.

Her parents thought she had lost her mind.

“They said, ‘You can’t make a living like that!’ Especially because of the racial prejudice,” she recalled.

“And I said, ‘But that hasn’t anything to do with it.’”

They compromised. She became an art teacher, then a teacher of art teachers. Each day, she hurried home from work to make her own art, which has since been exhibited from Baltimore to Italy. If creating was magical, teaching might’ve been even more delightful: It was like “throwing a pebble in the water,” with the result — her students’ lives — out of her control.

A local newspaper captured Lilian Thomas Burwell making art as a child in 1936 or 1937 but misspelled her name.

When she was featured in a recent documentary, former students, many of them now grandparents, wrote to her. They told her she was a big reason their lives had turned out one way or another — the pebble’s ripples, all those years later, finally visible.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m really somebody.’ Not because of who I am. But because of who I made.”

The Tom Brady of Composers Deon Nielsen Price, 88

Arroyo Grande, Calif.

Deon Nielsen Price has been working on her “musical memoirs” lately, but she would rather be composing. “There’s so many years! It’s very slow going.” Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times

As a teenager, Deon Nielsen Price admits, she had two loves.

“One was music,” she said. “The other was boys.”

She was singing at age 2, and through adolescence she dreamed of becoming a professional pianist. But she also wanted to marry and raise a family. Her mother assured her she could do both — and she did.

She brought up five children in a house full of music, while earning a doctoral degree. When one son became a clarinetist, the two formed a duo that performed around the world.

Age distribution of female musicians
Age 20304050607080902.5% 55Median age 88Deon

Today she writes music for ensembles across the country. “I’m just busy, busy, busy,” she said one day this fall while waiting for a plane. She had just wrapped up a recording session and was trying to fix a minor error in a composition for a concert a few days later, while juggling an influx of orders for a book on piano accompaniment that she self-publishes. And if that weren’t enough, there were dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to visit.

“When I started out, when I was young, I always wanted to have a rich life,” she said. “And brother, have I.”

The Tom Brady of Tour Guides Harvey Davidson, 84

New York

When tourists say they’re afraid to visit parts of New York City, Harvey Davidson reassures them. “No, this is a great city,” he says. “A wonderful city. Just go!” Victor Llorente for The New York Times

From a double-decker tour bus riding his typical route through the clamor of Manhattan, Harvey Davidson likes to point to a sign that reads: “Unnecessary noise prohibited.” The tourists love that, he says. “What is necessary noise?” he asks them, over the honks.

Age distribution of male tour guides
Age 20304050607080905% 36Median age 84Harvey

“People who are seeing New York City for the first time, they’re constantly looking up,” he said. “I have to get them to look down. To see things.”

Mr. Davidson only became a tour guide in his 60s, but he has a lifetime’s worth of New York City to share. Between stops he charms his charges with stories. He tells them about his messenger job for law firms when he was a teenager from Brooklyn, his encounter with Paul McCartney at the Empire State Building, and the time he was accidentally seated in a box beside Tom Hanks at a performance of “Chicago.”

“People saw me with him, and so they were handing me their programs to sign,” he recalled. “I should’ve signed them.”

The Tom Brady of Biologists Maria Elena Zavala, 72

Los Angeles

Professional longevity runs in Maria Elena Zavala’s family. Her grandfather tried and failed to retire in his 60s. Her father didn’t stop working until 72. “I’ll probably beat him by a little,” she said. Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times

Maria Elena Zavala is trying to make better beans.

She’s a professor of biology at California State University, Northridge, where she studies root systems and the nutritional content of beans.

Age distribution of female biologists
Age 20304050607080904% 37Median age 72Maria Elena

“I’m curious about how these plants work,” she said. “Still. After all these years!”

But it’s the students, not the plants, who keep her up at night — and keep her working. She teaches a disproportionately poor, unprepared population. Many are Hispanic and first-generation students. The majority have Pell Grants.

She’s taught them how to read critically, helped them get practical job skills, and, perhaps most importantly, shepherded many into Ph.D. programs. A historian once told her she was likely the first Mexican American woman to earn a doctorate in botany in the U.S., and she doesn’t want to be the last.

“I want everybody to see the beauty in science and participate in science and contribute to science,” she said. “It’s important for everybody. People’s curiosity didn’t get left at the Rio Grande. It didn’t vanish when they crossed the border.”

The Tom Brady of Loggers Earl Pollock, 82

Hamburg, Ark.

Earl Pollock comes from a long line of woodworkers, but the familial affinity for timber ends with him. “I’m the last.” Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times

Earl Pollock is no fan of weekends.

“I can’t wait from the weekend till Monday morning,” he said.

Age distribution of male loggers
Age 20304050607080902.5% 42Median age 82Earl

Monday morning usually finds Mr. Pollock, a logging foreman, in the cab of his bulldozer, flattening a road through the timber woods. It’s a natural evolution from the job he had as a teenager decades ago: felling trees with a power saw.

“Everything is mechanical work with air-conditioners and heaters; nobody’s out in the heat or cold anymore,” he said. “It’s not like it used to be.”

All these years in, the job still tickles him. From the cab, he spots meandering black bears and the big deer that he likes to hunt in his free time. Sometimes he catches disasters waiting to happen — like an old tire in the path of a machine, prone to start a fire. And he’s never once been injured.

“I keep the job on my mind 24/7,” he said. “I guess I’ll stay till I can’t get up in the morning.”

The Tom Brady of Dancers Dianne McIntyre, 76

Cleveland

Dianne McIntyre has been choreographing since she instructed the neighborhood children in dance routines at age 7. Agnes Lopez for The New York Times

Dianne McIntyre is now part of the history she has always loved.

In addition to her work in choreography and dance — more than five decades of it — she has been an avid student of dance and African American history. Now when graduate students write papers on the history of dance, they call her up to ask about her life.

Age distribution of female dancers
Age 20304050607080908% 26Median age 76Dianne

“Longevity is really a gift,” she said.

She still dances, too. Not the kind of dancing she did in her 20s, she says, but new movements. “You learn to choreograph for yourself, to have an expression that can still be uplifting.”

Recently she performed in New York City, the same place where she once began her career and started her dance company — young, eager, buoyed by the free jazz movement and the city itself, but uncertain of whether she could make a living out of dance. Now she knows that it worked out just fine.

Ms. McIntyre performing in 1972 with the dance company she started in New York City. Joan Patterson

“The only way I would stop any part of this — the mentoring, teaching, choreographing, all of that — would have to be an inner shift,” she said. “Something inside of me that would say, ‘Oh, I’m satisfied.’”

If that happens, she says, she might spend a bit more time at the spa. But for now: There’s still work to do.

The Tom Brady of Doctors Louis Caplan, 85

Boston

When it comes to keeping his mind sharp, Louis Caplan takes the advice that he gives his older patients: Exercise (he plays tennis) and stay engaged intellectually — in his case, by continuing the work that he started decades ago. Lauren O’Neil for The New York Times

These days, Dr. Louis Caplan, a practicing neurologist and professor of medicine, is teaching students 60 years younger than him his favorite part of medicine: how to take a patient’s history.

“The thing I like best in the world is sitting down with a patient, getting to know them, trying to help them,” he said. “I’ve been doing it so long it’s second nature.”

Age distribution of male physicians
Age 20304050607080902% 49Median age 85Louis

The brain has revealed itself to him over decades. When he was in college, it was a vast, unknown space, he says: There was little doctors could see, and few ways to help stroke patients, the specialty he chose.

Dr. Caplan himself helped change that: He built the Harvard Cooperative Stroke Registry in the 1970s, an electronic collection of symptoms, risk factors, diagnoses and outcomes — at a time when computers were foreign to most doctors. And he wrote and edited dozens of books.

These days, when not teaching or writing, he still sees patients, many older themselves. “My own physician told me that you go to the emergency room, and the doctors are just children!” he said. “Older patients, they’d prefer to see someone with a little gray hair than someone they think is too young."

Methodology

The distribution for other professions comes from A.C.S. five-year microdata from 2015-19, provided through IPUMS USA at the University of Minnesota. For each combination of gender and profession, based on 2010 occupational descriptions, respondents were counted only if they were currently employed.