THE SUNDAY PROFILE : The Human Tornado : As his nickname implies, there's no stopping Milton Tepper, 80, from sharing his message. It's value to the community--not age--that counts.

By MICHAEL QUINTANILLA

April 9, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Green squiggly lines dance on a screen, tracking Milton Tepper’s heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. A catheter is connected to his bladder. And his fourth blood transfusion in less than 10 hours has just begun.

This is not the Milton Tepper--groggy and in a backless hospital gown--everyone knows.

Just days earlier, Tepper the Human Tornado--an affectionate moniker given to the indefatigable 80-year-old volunteer by friends--had driven from the Hall of Administration Downtown to Anaheim’s Conestoga Hotel for the latest in a string of meetings, seminars and luncheons, arriving always on time, always with a smile, always with a bigger-than-life entrance.

He had recently told USC students about the importance of having sex in later life, “even though I can’t get an erection” because of a heart medicine.

He had executed high-fives with John Marshall high-schoolers in Los Feliz, who learned that old men aren’t grumpy. (“Do wrinkles hurt?” one asked. “Only when I iron them,” Tepper replied.)

As a guest on a public-access cable talk show in Marina del Rey, he had scolded the media for their negative portrayals of older people and, after the show, had engaged in some innocent flirting with the host, a spirited, leggy senior citizen in black suede pumps. (“You have a gorgeous narrow foot,” Tepper, a former shoe salesman, told her.)

He had held court over the Los Angeles County Commission on Aging--as its oldest president ever--doling out health services brochures he had picked up at a seminar. And in his booming, Arthur Godfrey-like voice, he had told everyone “to face up to the facts of life” and write to their congressmen and congresswomen about health-care reform, income security and crime.

“Don’t write to Gingrich,” he warned. “He won’t read it.”

But now, doctors and nurses in the intensive care unit at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank are trying to stop Tepper’s internal bleeding. He had driven himself to the hospital the night before in his red 1975 Mercedes with matching hubcaps. Chest pains had jolted him awake.

“I really can’t be here right now,” he says about the sudden setback. He’s got meetings, conferences and an opera to see.

Worse, he has no phone.

“There’s so much I have to do,” he says.

For one, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) has appointed him as a delegate to the 1995 White House Conference on Aging next month. About 2,000 men and women from across the country will discuss health care, Social Security, affordable housing, elder abuse, and the image and roles of older people. The group will then make policy recommendations to President Clinton.

“There’s got to be a phone in here,” Tepper says, his voice fading. He must let a friend--a woman in her 30s--know that he can’t make a concert date. “She’s a darling baby,” he says, adding that he calls all younger women “babies,” a term he uses with respect. “You know, the young women of today are so brilliant, so together, so independent. They are to be admired.

“Do you see a phone in here?” he asks, his words barely audible, his eyelids shutting. Tepper the Tornado dozes off.

Tepper fell into the role of senior-citizen activist by chance. At 60 he was fired from his sales manager job with an office machine company after 21 years. The company had been bought by a larger one, which replaced him with its own, younger guy.

“The new general manager had me meet him at Los Angeles airport at 6 in the morning. He told me I no longer had a job, which was kind of shocking at that time in the morning. He said, ‘Don’t even come back to the office,’ ” Tepper recalls.

He’s working the phones at USC’s Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center, fielding inquiries about Alzheimer’s disease, nursing homes and job opportunities for older workers.

Getting fired was a terrible blow, Tepper says. Because of his experience, he was management material. But he was also too close to 65 to compete successfully for such jobs. The only ones he could get were as a janitor or a security guard.

“Imagine, at my age, carrying a gun and guarding a mall,” he says. “I asked my wife if she minded if we lived on less income.”

His children were grown and on their own. Tepper didn’t play golf. He couldn’t stand daytime television. All he knew was that he “still felt capable.”

So, on the advice of a friend, he went to the Andrus center to look for volunteer work.

“I didn’t even know what the word gerontology meant,” he recalls.

Twenty years later, Andrus and Tepper are synonymous.

He has been chairman of the Andrus Volunteers, a program in which more than 40 retired or semi-retired people act as docents and as research subjects for students. He started the Andrus Volunteers Advocacy Committee and has served as its executive board member.

His experience as a peer counselor at the Andrus Older Adult Center led him to co-write a manual on how to conduct senior counseling groups. And he is in demand as a public speaker on the college and high school circuits.

Tepper also serves on numerous advisory boards for multipurpose centers, home health services, adult care centers, interfaith councils and elder abuse task forces. He has been a fellow for several foundations and is the past chairman of Congressman Berman’s Senior Advisory Council, the only group of its kind in Southern California.

“Milton Tepper is a dear friend and my top adviser on issues relating to aging Americans,” Berman says. “He’s personally helped hundreds of older Americans recognize the joy of living life to its fullest.” He was also the congressman’s first choice to attend next month’s White House conference.

Tepper is looking forward to the hometown visit. Born in Washington, D.C., to a Russian father, a quiet man, and an Austrian mother, who was just the opposite, Tepper grew up in a multiethnic neighborhood where he made friends with everyone.

“My folks were not well-to-do. Poverty’s a great leveler. When you’re little, you don’t think anything of it,” he says.

His parents, especially his mother, who helped run the family’s clothing business, taught him to take a deep interest in people and always to help others.

“One time an employee cut her finger, a minor thing. But my mother gave that finger as much attention as if the woman had broken her leg. Another time my mother made an appointment with a dentist for one of her workers, and she made sure that my father drove the woman so her toothache would be taken care of right then and there.”

Tepper does the same, driving older friends on errands and to doctors’ appointments.

Viola Berton, 86, whom Tepper has known for 17 years, says she is grateful he’s around. “I’m handicapped walking, handicapped hearing, handicapped seeing. He calls me and says, ‘Viola, I have some time today. Do you need a ride anywhere?’ He told me his mother taught him that a car is to be used to help people. He’s very generous about that.”

Natalie Gold-Lumer, 54, the former director of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Council on Aging and now the executive director of OPICA Day Care Center, says Tepper helped her arrange a job fair for senior citizens. Everyone had told her it would be impossible.

“I’ll tell you this: Milton is a very tenacious man. He made it happen.” She soon nabbed him for the day-care center’s board because “he is focused on everything that has to do with aging: the health bills, Medicare and Social Security.” Later, he was voted president.

“He’s the godfather of aging,” says Wendy Free, director of development for USC’s School of Gerontology. “He’s here, there, everywhere.”

Colleague Muriel Elbert says she’s always been impressed with Tepper’s mental acuity. “If I don’t have a solution, I’ll call Milton. He is proof that an aging mind does not equate to mental frailty. He knows how to get information, how to put people together. He does his homework,” says Elbert, who runs the Andrus center’s Ageism in the Schools program, in which volunteers visit schools to dispel the myths of aging.

“At 80, he has the energy of a 40-year-old,” says Fernando Torres-Gil, assistant secretary for aging at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a native Angeleno.

“The one thing I’ve always admired about him is that older persons, especially white elders who have good retirement incomes, choose to leave the city, get away from it all. Milton could have done that, but he didn’t. . . . He is an extraordinary senior activist, a legend. Milton has been one of my advisers, a teacher and historian,” he adds.

Tepper is embarrassed by the attention.

“I’m no hero. I have no college education. I only finished high school,” he says. “But I do remember enjoying school very much.” Especially reading. He recalls taking the streetcar to the public library in Washington and checking out the limit of 10 books.

“I’d get back on the streetcar. And by the time I got home, I’d finish one book.”

He attended college for a year. “Where the hell did I go? Sometimes I forget,” he says, pausing for a few seconds. “Oh, yes, it was a Catholic university in Washington, but I didn’t enjoy it. You could say I’ve gotten my education through meeting and being with people. I love people, all people. And, maybe growing old has brought me some wisdom.”

Tepper has outlived most of his family, including his brother, his sister and his wife, Thelma, who died 12 years ago of a stroke. The couple had been married for 42 years.

There isn’t a day when Milton doesn’t think about Thelma. Nightly, before dinner, he lifts his first stiff toddy of J & B in a toast to her. He points to her Chinese watercolors hanging throughout his home. He recalls their mutual love of classical music and of a dim sum meal on Sundays that always began with a glass of champagne.

Throughout the house, on top of shelves, tables, counters and the piano Thelma played in the evenings, are pigs--all sizes, colors, shapes--a collection she started as a new bride while Milton was serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps in Topeka, Kan.

He proposed to her on their first date, after the opera “La Traviata,” which ends tragically for the heroine and hero. But not for the Teppers. They moved to California in 1942, attracted by the climate, and bought the North Hollywood home where their two sons, Bruce and Steven, would reign over a back yard with wind-up cars and chalk marks on the concrete depicting Brucetown and Stevenville. Bruce, now 50, lives in San Francisco, and Steven, 46, in Palo Alto.

Since his wife’s death, Tepper, who gets by on the interest from savings and Social Security, has arranged for USC students to share his home. But not because he’s lonely. He just doesn’t want to be alone if he has a stroke.

Last month, a young Chinese couple, Ellen Lu and Kevin Wang became the latest roommates. Between classes, including Wang’s English-language lessons, they clean and cook meals in exchange for room and board.

“We see each other at night,” says Lu, who is working on her doctorate. “Milton’s always on the go.”

It’s been three days since Tepper’s hospitalization. The bleeding has stopped. Blood pressure is normal. The chest pains are gone. He’s out of intensive care and in a room with a phone that has been burning up the wires. His sons and friends have been in constant contact. A few get-well cards and flowers have arrived.

On a night stand is Tepper’s pocket calendar, filled with appointments. He’s missed meetings as well as a Los Angeles Philharmonic performance and a “Blood Brothers” matinee.

Earlier in the day he had two biopsies, and now the verdict is in. A doctor explains that a cancerous growth--”one of the smallest I’ve ever seen,” he says--has been found in the colon. Surgery is needed.

Tepper takes the news calmly.

“I have no desire to be frightened by this,” he says. “I’d just better be out of here by the end of the week. I’ve got two conferences and an opera waiting for me in San Diego.”

Aging is a process of accepting personal losses, Tepper says. He has seen many seniors succumb to anxiety and depression after a spouse dies, after being fired, after being made to feel as if they’re useless or unwanted.

“One of the highest rates of suicide in the United States is white males over 60,” he says. “Often, an old person might feel like they have nobody who needs them or wants them. Why be around if nobody cares? That’s why I feel, at least for me, that it’s important to do something of value.”

Tepper’s son Bruce, who operates a San Francisco travel consulting business with a partner, says he and younger brother Steven, in computer research, have encouraged their dad to slow down. “But my dad will have nothing to do with that,” Bruce says. “He’s an independent guy, outgoing and determined.

“I remember after my mother died he took a trip to Europe,” Bruce recalls. “My wife was trying to get him tickets for a play in London, but she couldn’t get anything confirmed for the night he wanted. When he came back he said he had no problem getting in. He got the tickets and also went to the cast party! That’s my dad.”

Last year, Milton’s sons and friends hosted a birthday party that drew 200 revelers. Berman and other officials turned out for the celebration. The day before, City Councilman Joel Wachs surprised Tepper with a personal visit, a city proclamation and plaque.

“I don’t know how to define old because I don’t pay much attention to age,” Tepper says. “I’m involved because I enjoy it. It’s my life. To me, people are everything.”

His people-come-first attitude shows in his politics.

In five years, Tepper will join the ranks of octogenarians frequently referred to as the “oldest old”--85 years and up. That population, the fastest-growing age group in the United States, will reach 4.5 million by the year 2000, and will have a substantial impact on health-care costs.

A national health plan, Tepper argues, “would take the profit out of the insurance companies. And you’d only qualify for the plan if you ate nutritiously, if you didn’t smoke, use drugs or drink. Now I like to take a drink. But under this plan, I wouldn’t get covered.”

Social Security, he says, was not designed to completely support older people. “The biggest problem with Social Security is that it’s going to shrink considerably because less people are working and more people are growing older.”

His solution would be twofold: A good national health plan would cut medical costs tremendously. And employing senior citizens part time would allow them to draw partial benefits and still support the system. “We’re skilled and knowledgeable,” he says. “We carry our own insurance or have Medicare. Maybe the state of California could rent us out. We’d like nothing better than to help boost our economy.”

Five days after Tepper drove to the hospital, he drove home, eager to keep his date for “Don Pasquale,” answer inquiries at the Andrus center, lead meetings, network at luncheons and crack his corny jokes for students. Surgery is scheduled after the White House conference.

Tepper the Tornado is hankering to hit D.C.

And points beyond.

“I want to be around for the year 2000. I want to write that number on a check,” he says, days later. “But mostly I just want to keep educating people about us old people. I would like for people not to base their opinion of us on our age because we are all different.” Not all 80-year-old men are alike--and age, in regard to stamina, employment and mental agility, should not be looked at chronologically, he says.

“I’m not decrepit or senile. Shouldn’t our worth, instead, be based on our value to the community? Isn’t that fair? I think so.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Milton Tepper Age: 80.

Native?: No; born in Washington, D.C., shares his North Hollywood home with USC students.

Family: Widower for 12 years; two sons, Bruce, 50, and Steven, 46.

Passions: Classical music, dim sum on Sunday mornings and helping others.

On making a marriage last: “Today, in this era, marriage is treated frivolously. Some people give it two years and then they cut out. Some think, ‘If it doesn’t work this time, I’ll give it another shot with someone else.’ . . . So wait until you’re sure and find somebody who has common interests with you, someone you can talk to about everything, someone willing to compromise. . . . Marriage is more than sex.”

On growing old: “If I found the fountain of youth there’s no way I would drink from it. . . . I accept the challenges of growing old and I adjust. I move forward, not back. It’s like I always say: Old people are all different. Some people resent getting old and many people can handle it fine. But one thing, for sure, is that we aren’t all bald and grumpy, sitting in a wheelchair.”

On aging in Los Angeles: “Los Angeles is a great place for talking to people. It’s the diversity of the city that turns me on. But L.A. also is a big turnoff when it comes to older people. This is a place where so much emphasis is placed on age and youthfulness. The minute you reach a certain age, you’re considered to be someone who cannot contribute, who cannot work. Old people are not throwaways. We’re keepsakes.”