After Barbara Klee taught her last class at Los Altos’ Hillview Community Center in December, current and former students flooded in, baked goods in hand, to celebrate the longtime teacher.
Even after years watching Klee in action, they still wanted to know her secrets – How old is this local dynamo? What keeps her ticking?
You won’t find out from the woman herself. The no-nonsense former teacher doesn’t go for soliloquies. Her undiminished physicality has offered the only answers over the years. In a turtleneck and sweats, she proved again and again that through age and injury, the body loves to stretch, move and keep pace with a feisty mind.
Tenacious teacher
As instructor of the Stretch & Flex class at Hillview, Klee drew a flock of octo- and nonagenarians each Tuesday and Thursday. When she started the program in the early 1980s, she was younger than many participants. By now? It’s a race to set the age record each week.
“I always told my class that it’s an attitude,” Klee said. “My mother lived to be 100. I’m not there yet, but I’m reaching for that.”
Klee teaches tenacity, but her students – and her husband – say that their loyalty also stems from her warmth as a teacher.
“She was a better teacher than I was, because people loved her,” John Klee said admiringly at the retirement party her students planned in her honor.
The couple moved to Los Altos in 1961. They met as youth traveling through Europe. Both worked as language teachers, with John spending more than three decades as an educator at Foothill College and Klee adding fitness classes to her portfolio over time.
She taught French for Mountain View’s Adult Education program and was struck by her calling while in front of the classroom.
“I have always done exercise classes, but as a student, not as a teacher,” Klee said. “I looked at my French class one day and thought – they look old. You guys, you’ve got to do something!”
It took her a while to get her own class launched, but she had a model to follow. She’d loved Norm Manoogian’s class at Foothill College, and asked if he’d mind if she echoed some of his ideas in her own program.
The end of an era
Why end now, to the dismay of her followers?
“I guess I’d had enough – 60 years, is that enough?” Klee asked.
Los Altos resident Martine Levy started taking Klee’s class because she had serious arthritis.
“I was in bad shape,” Levy said. “And I’m not kidding you – in six months all my pain disappeared. At the beginning, it was so painful that I couldn’t sit down and get up.”
Klee is “very inspiring – dedicated and fun,” Levy added.
The community Klee has built within the class – all of the older adult students who watch each other start to move more easily and feel better in their own bodies – adds much of its value.
Lynne Farrell, also of Los Altos, said she came to the class to meet people as well as to work on balance.
“It helps physically, but also spiritually,” she said.
Farrell recalled an early experience in the class, when she was still getting schooled by her elders: “‘You’ll get there, dear,’ a little old lady in her 90s said, lying next to me. It’s kind of a meditation – in a way, it’s peaceful.”
Linda Lumish of Palo Alto said she started the class stiff and now finds herself moving “very nicely.”
“I’m really going to miss her and John – just seeing them, you can see what you age into – if you’re very lucky,” Lumish said.
Their tributes don’t sound the death knell of stretching in Los Altos – though Klee has retired, exercise classes for older adults continue. Edna Pear, who guessed she’d been taking the class for the past 15 years, said she was relieved classes will still be available.
“You feel the stiffness in the body,” Pear said. “By coming to the class, you can move again, and you make a lot of good friends, too.”
For more information on the city’s fitness classes, visit losaltosca.gov/recreation.
