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DR. GEORGE KNOX: I'm Dr. George Knox. I'm 91 and a half, and I'm a practicing psychologist. Basically I deal with anxiety, stress control, hypnosis. Because now almost everybody is anxious….

HOST: Everybody but George Knox, who may be the oldest practicing psychologist in the country. Did I mention he also runs ultra-marathons? Dr. Knox has been a hypnotherapist in the town of Gahanna, Ohio for more than a half century. Today, he hypnotizes full-time. When he first set up shop in Gahanna many, many years ago, Dr. Knox wore two hats.

KNOX: I was practicing both psychology and optometry. For a while I had them both in the same office. And although most people would make appointment, sometimes somebody would walk in, and you didn't know if they needed their glasses adjusted or they were having trouble with their wife.

All the males in family tree tended to die in their 50s and 60s from heart attacks. I had mine at 55, and in hospital I heard someone say about five more years, and I didn't like that too well. So I began to think, What can I do to prolong that a little bit? And that was 36 years ago. So I guess I did something right.

I began jogging around our pool in back yard. And I got tired of going in circles. So one day I decided I'm going to start running straight. So I put on bedroom slippers and took off into the town of Gahanna. It wasn't long until the police stopped me, and they didn't know if I was being chased or chasing somebody -- or maybe they thought I was kind of loony -- and I said I wasn't chasing anybody, and no one chasing me.

After I was in the upper 80s somewhere, I climbed a mountain, and I got up to the top, and it was real quiet and peaceful. Pretty soon I heard rumbling, and here a bus was coming up, filled with senior citizens. And they came up and I mingled among them, especially since I was a senior citizen too. And then when it was time to leave, the people in charge started gathering up everybody and so they told me to get in the bus, and I told them I climbed up. And they wouldn't believe me. They tried to push me onto the bus. I said, "Look, I didn't get all sweaty like this riding up on the bus." Probably thought I was having senile delusions or something.

I ran marathons and ultra marathons. One was one hundred kilometers, sixty-two miles. I programmed ahead of time to myself how I would do it. You can go into a mild hypnosis, self-hypnosis, and you just feel like you're sort of just floating along. And every so often you check in on the body to see if it's doing all right.

The sixty-two-mile run was at Scioto Downs in Columbus, a horse race place. It was all day. Actually the others had quit. And it was getting dark at the end, and they gave me a flashlight. Finally they found where they could turn on the big glaring overhead lights. And a couple of cars came in thinking there was a horse race going on. They said, No, it's just an old man running around and around the track. And they left in disgust.

Producer: Karen Callahan / Executive Producer: David Isay / Funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Special thanks to Monika Hill at Experience Works, a non-profit that provides training and employment services for mature workers.

"George Knox, Hypnotherapist" premiered January 4, 2003, on Weekend Edition Saturday. Copyright © 2003 Sound Portraits Productions. All Rights Reserved.

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		intro
		transcript

		Anti-Aging: A Triple Approach to Longevity, an essay by Dr. Knox
		A photo of Knox with his running trophies

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