Maggie Growls

Maggie Kuhn Two local filmmakers profile the legendary founder of the Gray Panthers
Edited by Jennifer Fletcher

The film Maggie Growls, which kicks off the new, weekly Independent Lens series on Tuesday, February 4 at 10 p.m., is a portrait of the amazing, canny, lusty, charming and unstoppable Maggie Kuhn, who founded the Gray Panthers in 1970 after being forced to retire from a job she loved at the age of 65.

Produced by the Philadelphia-based filmmaking team of Barbara Attie (who also made Daring to Resist, an award-winning film presented nationally by WHYY about three Jewish girls who risked their own lives to resist the Nazis) and Janet Goldwater, Maggie Growls examines how the long-time Delaware Valley resident turned her outrage and determination into a campaign against ageism that forever changed the lives of older Americans.

Born in Buffalo in 1905, Kuhn was a passionate social activist right from the start. In 1926, she started a job at the YWCA in Cleveland, organizing poor and working women. In 1950, she began a 20-year stint in the Social Education and Action Office of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. It was a job she adored, that kept her in the forefront of the social activist movement for decades.

When she turned 65 and was forced to give up the career she loved, Kuhn decided that she would not fade away quietly. Saying "don't agonize, organize," and reminding them that they had nothing to lose, she galvanized a group of friends and colleagues who had also been put prematurely out to pasture and launched the career for which she is renowned: as founder and leader of the Gray Panthers.

In an era replete with "movements," the media quickly latched onto Kuhn. With a disarming mixture of humor, shock value and common sense, she deftly used her high visibility to combat media stereotypes that denigrated the elderly and went on to champion universal health care, nursing home reform, shared housing and consumer protection.

Maggie Growls looks at the forces that shaped the movement as well as its leader, using Kuhn's life as a lens through which to examine the intertwined issues of social reform and aging in America. We see Kuhn's second career unfold in television appearances with Johnny Carson; on Capitol Hill, chiding senators and congressmen; and on the picket line, fighting injustice for all people, wherever she could.

We also see her very human, womanly side as she speaks fondly of her many love affairs and close friendships. Kuhn's insistence on talking publicly about sex, which often made her listeners squirm, leads to a serious re-thinking about what growing old was all about. As Kuhn said, "sex and learning end only when rigor mortis sets in."

Interspersed are interviews with friends and colleagues including Ralph Nader and Studs Terkel and animated sequences by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. Kuhn, who continued to play a role in the Gray Panthers until her death at age 89 in 1995, is widely acknowledged as having started nothing less than a contemporary cultural revolution, both in terms of redefining the meaning of age and through her insistence on "young and old together."

Her defiant "Panther growl" and dramatic slogan "Do something outrageous every day" set the tone for a film as memorable and inspiring as the woman herself.

Maggie Growls airs Tuesday, February 4 at 10 p.m. on WHYY TV12. In the original WHYY program The Gray Panther: Maggie Kuhn, at 11 p.m., which was first broadcast in 1987, producer Glenn Holsten profiles this energetic social activist and long-time Delaware Valley resident.