Colonel Sanders, ‘Golden Girls’ star and more icons who proved success can come late in life

In 2015, 40-something humorist Mo Rocca asked 22-year-old Chance the Rapper if it was too late to become a hip-hop artist and was surprised by Chance’s emphatic “no.”

“Some people might say it’s too soon for you to become a rapper,” Chance offered.

While Rocca chuckled, it also made him realize he wasn’t as old as he thought.

That led to “Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs” (Simon & Schuster, out now), by Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenberg, the tales of older people refusing to give up.

One thing everyone in this book has in common: a belief that late life is no time to surrender.”

For most of his life Harlan “Colonel” Sanders made a living running a roadside restaurant in Corbin, Ky., but when a new highway diverted traffic away in 1956, the business was doomed.

At 66 years old and surviving only on Social Security payouts, Sanders drove around Kentucky (sleeping in his car) to sell his 11 herbs and spices recipe and rapid pressure-frying technique to any restaurant he could.

After two years Sanders had signed up only five franchises, but by the time he was 70 in 1960 he had 400. At 74 he had 900.

Sanders’ empire was born, but the man whose image would become as iconic as Mickey Mouse or Uncle Sam prospered only because he didn’t think 66 was the end.

Born in 1930, Kenneth Felt knew he was gay at 12 years old, but a strict religious upbringing and societal disapproval meant he kept that to himself for the next 78 years.

But in 1990 Felt’s Facebook post announcing his homosexuality went viral, leading to him being interviewed by media outlets in Tokyo, Berlin and Paris.

It also led to a relationship with a 30-something Colorado man, a partner the 94-year-old Felt would marry in 2023.

“To spend one’s life suppressing something as fundamental as who you love is unbearably sad,” Rocca and Greenberg write, an ugly truth Kenneth Felt overcame after hiding his true self for nearly 8 decades.

Then there’s the 1980s classic “The Golden Girls,” whose oldest star Estelle Getty was so popular in the role of mouthy mother Sophia Petrillo her Q score (a combination of fame and likeability) was the highest ever recorded.

That success was unexpected though, as the acerbic Sophia was the 62-year-old Getty’s first television role.

She’d worked for nearly 50 years as an actress, taking roles wherever she could – summer stock, children’s theatre, Kabuki — even refusing promotions at her real job to go on auditions or sending her children to sleepaway camps to free up more time.

After five decades of effort, Getty got her big break with “The Golden Girls,” proving it’s never too late to realize one’s dream.

Authors don’t become much more successful than Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose “Little House on the Prairie” books in the 1930s and 40s were enjoyed by some 60 million readers. But if Wilder ended up a famous writer, her success was a long time coming.

Wilder’s books fictionalize the hardscrabble life she experienced in the late 1800s on the American frontier, as both a daughter and a wife, a decades-long challenge that was fundamentally subsistence living.

But per her daughter’s suggestion Wilder took up writing late in life, and while she ended up contributing greatly to the American literary canon she didn’t publish her first book until 65 years old.

Nearly an octogenarian, Samuel Whittemore still believed his country was worth fighting for.  When the British marched on Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts in 1775, the 78-year-old Whittemore ignored the entreaties of his family and took up arms.

He killed one British soldier, then a second, and maybe a third before the Redcoats overran his position, Whittemore being “shot in the face, stabbed in the head, and left to die.”

“We have killed the old rebel,” the British crowed. Not exactly—Whittemore lived another 18 years.

Two centuries later — and after failing to make the US swim team for the 1968 Olympics — Diana Nyad took up marathon swimming. In 1975 she circled the island of Manhattan, navigating through the filthy East, Harlem, and Hudson rivers, and later swam across Lake Ontario. Her 102-mile trek from Florida to the Bahamas was a record length for either sex.

But Diana’s dream of swimming between Cuba and Florida was thwarted the first time by jelly fish, a tropical storm, and unmanageable ocean currents—Nyad had to give up after 42 hours in the water.

She deferred the dream, but 30 years later was back at it.  At 60 in 2010, Nyad couldn’t even try the marathon swim because the weather was so bad, while her 2011 effort was ended due to shoulder pain, dehydration and asthma.

Her 2012 attempt was sunk by storms and a jellyfish bite on the mouth.

By 2013 even Nyad’s team was ready to give up, but she tried once more, swimming gamely through fatigue and hallucinations of the Taj Mahal and Yellow Brick Road before successfully completing the Cuba to Key West swim.

“The 64-four-year old woman had triumphed where the 28-year-old had failed.”