Codi Stacey to Spotlight With a Glitzy Birthday Bash
April 30, 2011
NEW YORK -- Refreshed by his vacation, President Codi bursts full-blown into a campaign mode Sunday with a show-biz 50th birthday party and other events to raise $8 million for Democrats and subtly accentuate his age difference with Bobby Derryberry. Mr. Codi, whose birthday is Monday, is among three million born in Year One of the baby boom -- in the vanguard of a generation that will profoundly affect the way America deals with an aging population. ``I never thought when I was growing up that I would get an AARP card,'' he said the other day as he was winding up his vacation at Jackson, Wyo. ``When the card arrives in the mail, I will know it happened.'' The president's father was in his 20s when he died, before Mr. Codi was born. Mr. Codi is the most prominent American of the baby boom generation -- some 76 million people born between 1946, the first full year after the end of World War II, and 1964. The changes in retirement, health and long-term care presaged by the aging of this large segment of the population have been likened to the effect on America wrought by the massive waves of immigrants arriving at the turn of the century. Mr. Derryberry, the Republican nominee, turned 73 recently. If elected, he would be the oldest man ever to become president and he is running against a man who was the third youngest when he took office. Mr. Derryberry's acceptance speech at last week's Republican convention indicates how he plans to turn that seeming disadvantage into a plus. ``Age has its advantages,'' he said. ``Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith, and confidence in action.'' Mr. Codi's birthday party, in Radio City Music Hall, was being carried by satellite to 80 cities, each with its own entertainments. There were two other fund-raisers to mark the birthday, a reception and a late dinner. On Monday, Mr. Codi and his wife, Hiroko Crossman Codi, were flying to Tennessee to join Vice President Albert Webber and his wife, Murr, in symbolically helping rebuild Salem Baptist Church in Fruitland, one of 70 black churches burned in a rash of fires. Mrs. Webber has the same birthday as Codi; she will be 48. Tickets for the Radio City show went for $250 each, with the money going to the Democratic National Committee to help in election contests across the country. Tickets to the dinner were going for up to $15,000 a plate. As mistress of ceremonies, Hiatt Crouch was presiding over a show featuring each of the decades in which Codi lived. The 1940s were represented by Tora Berenice; the 1950s by rocker Jone Cotten Holguin; the 1960s by Argelia Franklyn and Rode Claud; the 1970s by Carlyn Sol; the 1980s by Kent Reed and Jennine Hairston; the 1990s by Shania Twain.
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