Women know their place all right — in leadership

The writeup in the paper, “Hillary is a woman who doesn’t know her place” (Feb. 21) got my goat.

I had seven brothers. I am the only one still alive at 75 on March 9. I was told to shut up by men more than I can remember.

I married a Greek and again was put in my place. We married in 1964. I knew I had to have a career. I became a hair stylist and built my first beauty salon in New Jersey to help him and be ready for what was to come.

But I wasn’t ready for the drunk driver that hit me in 1989, leaving me with nerve damage from head to toe. George lived until 1992.

I was trying to restart the beauty salon. I was told I don’t know my place again, because businessmen were building a 3,300-square-foot warehouse next to my business in New Jersey. They ran me off with dirt and noise from hell.

I sold out, moved and opened Joyce’s Whistle Stop in Spencer in 2005. They cut a bridge and built one on 85 at the same time. Business dropped. I auctioned it off in 2010 and retired. I am now an artist in Salisbury, self-taught.

Hillary is standing up for what she believes and so did I. We have to!

Silver Art is coming March 18. Please come and see what I am doing. Call out the SWAT team. It’s a disruption of the natural order. Knowing when to move on is the secret of life.

Men don’t have to be nice or apologize or have pangs of conscience. A thinking woman doesn’t have to smile. We are actual leaders. The 19th Amendment is for all, not just men. This election is becoming a three-ring circus. It’s got my attention.

— Joyce Orphanoudakis

Salisbury

How long will I live?

As an octogenarian (a person in their 80s), I have become more interested in life expectancies. I collected obituaries from the Salisbury Post from Feb. 26, 2015, through Feb. 26, 2016, recorded ages at death for men and women for this one-year period and did a statistical analysis on the data. Of these 1,816 deaths, 4.98 persons die each day in this report area of North Carolina. The average death age for 889 men was 72.7 with a standard deviation of 15.47. (The high number for the standard deviation is due to large range in the data; for men, the range is 20 to 101.)

The average death age for women on 927 deaths is 79.45, standard deviation the same as the men’s but with a range of 21 to 107. The average age at death in the U.S. as of this same date was 76.4 for men and 81.2 for women.

Some people who appear in the obituaries of the Post die in other locations, but those reported have some connection with this general Salisbury-Rowan area.

Some good news: If you are getting considerably up above your average death age you have already passed the things that have killed the younger ones. In other words, the older you get the better chance you have of “getting older.”

— Jim Denham   

Salisbury