Google welcomes Santa Rosa’s Olive Horrell, 97, for tour of the future

Ever been invited to the Wonderland-like global headquarters of Google for a VIP tour and lunch? Me neither.

The remarkable 97-year-old Olive Horrell became a sweetheart of Google during a visit arranged by a nonprofit that grants requests by seniors.

“The people were so wonderful at Google,” Olive said Wednesday from her home at a Brookdale Senior Living complex in Santa Rosa. “They didn’t treat me like a little old lady.”

The Google tour was arranged by the Colorado-based Wish of a Lifetime, created by former Olympic skier and NFL player Jeremy Bloom in 2008 to fulfill wishes by people older than 65.

Olive recalls that as she contemplated her application for a granted wish, “I knew I had to think of something that had a hook.” As an elder who relies on the Internet to keep current with friends and the events of the world, it occurred to her that instead of asking to revisit someplace from her past, she’d request to see the technology that’s coming to the future from Google.

IT WORKED. Jeremy Bloom was so taken by Olive’s application that he went with her to Google’s sprawling campus in Mountain View.

There, Olive, accompanied also by her daughter, Jean Kahn, rode in a self-driving car, felt sure she could reach and touch the horse she viewed through a DIY virtual-reality headset, came at last to understand The Cloud, and used a stylus to color a custom Doodle on a touch-screen computer.

She was blown away by it all.

“Certainly in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t conceive of what I saw,” Olive said.

Her adventure in aging in the era of personal technology continues today in San Francisco.

She’ll reconnect there with her new friend Jeremy Bloom, who went into sports broadcasting, joined a tech company and founded Wish of a Lifetime following his long run as a world-class skier and a member of the Philadelphia Eagles and then the Pittsburgh Steelers. Wish of a Lifetime seeks “to shift the way society views and values our oldest generations by fulfilling seniors’ dreams and sharing their stories to inspire those of all ages.”

At Bloom’s invitation, Olive will speak on a panel at Aging 2.0, the AgeTech Expo. She’ll no doubt inspire elders to stay plugged in, stay forward-looking, stay young.

BY EXAMPLE, Olive has dealt inspiration to others any number of times before. Imagine: She celebrated turning 80 by dog-mushing in Alaska.

When she was 59 long ago, the doctor for an expedition that would ascend Nepal’s Annapurna mountain to an elevation of 18,000 feet told her she was too old for the climb. “So,” she said, “I went and did it.”

After a long, varied career that included working in Sacramento as legislative liaison for the state Department of Aging, Olive took a summer job as a wilderness ranger at Green River Lakes in Wyoming.

And about six years back, she said, “I flunked hospice.” She appeared to be descending toward imminent death but got turned around.

The Montana native came to Sonoma County in 2000 to be closer to her daughter. “I feel very fortunate to be living my last years here,” she said.

Very fortunate. Clearly, that’s the same way Google and Sonoma feel about the gift of Olive Horrell.Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.