Fun At 70

Age Is Only A State Of Mind

(CBS)  Over the past couple years, his research has led Correspondent Steve Hartman down some dire roads. But in Lexington, Ky., for the first time, chance led him to point in the phonebook straight to one Dyer Rodes.

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Actually his wife Milly Rodes answered.

"My husband's not a phone answerer," she says. That is why the story is about her, a retired dance teacher, with a remarkable ability to wear you out, just watching.

She exercises three days a week at the local gym and still has enough energy left to whip the pants off her daughter at Ping-Pong.

If you didn't know better, you'd think she forgot her Ritalin, and you still haven't even heard the best part.

"I'm 70," Rodes says about her age.

The fact is, she just celebrated her birthday a few months ago, and although she says the party was great, perhaps staring at all those candles wasn't.

"I thought, 'Oh my gosh, 70,'" she says.

Of course as anyone over 29 can attest, a birthday that ends in a zero is a toughie. It's like 10 years of aging packed into that one painful little day. But Rodes says 30, 40, 50, and even 60 never bothered her.

"Sixty-five a little bit," she admits. "But 70 has been a little more tough."

She now finds herself turning to the obituary part of the paper, and worse yet, recognizing names.

"It seems like every other week we've gone to the funeral home," she adds.

And at the gym, her lifelong thirst for exercise, now comes on the rocks - as she finds herself now using ice bags.

And yet, Rodes says it's not just the teltale signs of aging that made 70 hard. It was that since childhood, she always had this idea of what this year would be like.

Then one day, she just stuck a pin into that pessimistic thought bubble.

"Suddenly a new awakening here. Now I'm thinking 70 is still young," she says.

Rodes is now planning to be more active in her 70s than she was in her 60s. "We're going to set up a volleyball court and a badminton court right along here," she says.

And that's the story of Milly Rodes, a woman who not only makes 70 look fun, she almost makes you want to hurry up and get there.