Oprah Winfrey, Madonna, Kate Winslet, Jane Fonda and Bill Moyers have all stayed on the famous Rancho la Puerta Wellness resort and spa, an exquisite collection of casitas, pavilions, pools and gardens nestled on 4,000 acres of mountains in Baja California, Mexico.
The property’s biggest star, nonetheless, is Deborah Szkeley, who founded the ranch together with her husband in 1940 and today – at 102 years old – embodies every thing the property strives for: health, longevity and peace of mind.
“On the morning of my 100th birthday, I lay in bed and thought, ‘Hmm, I’m 100. What’s different?’ I couldn’t think of anything,” says Szekely. Assets, She sat for a recent interview in her hotel suite in New York City, where she had flown in from her home in San Diego to talk at two different wellness conferences. “I’ve had a beautiful life, and when it’s over, it’s over. But I’m enjoying it,” she says. “I really don’t have any worries that I can’t do anything about. Otherwise I’d be an old lady! But where I can do something, I do something.”
The Brooklyn native has achieved a dizzying amount in her life, including the founding and management of Rancho la Puerta and in addition the Golden Doora luxury Japanese spa and resort in San Diego (which she sold in 1998). At age 60, she ran for Congress and was president of the Inter-American FoundationAt the age of 80, she realized a long-held dream and founded the New Americans Museum and Immigration Learning Center in San Diego.
They are all expressions of her youth rooted in values comparable to healthy living, vegetarianism and sustainability, as advocated by her mother, a Jewish-Austrian immigrant and “health fanatic” who was a nurse and vp of the New York Vegetarian Society and who switched her family to an all-fruit weight-reduction plan. In 1934, she made a daring decision that modified the family’s life perpetually.
“It was the Depression. And my father was very depressed,” recalls Szkeley, née Shainman. He was 12 when his mother caught him checking his life insurance policy and he or she feared he would commit suicide.
“One day my mother came to dinner and said, ‘We’re leaving in 16 days.’ And my brother and I and my father looked at her, and my father said, ‘Where?’ ‘Tahiti.’ And we said, ‘Where is that?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know. But here are the tickets.'” She had chosen the destination due to fresh air and fresh fruit – each of which were briefly supply in New York through the Depression – and shortly all of them boarded a steamship and spent several weeks traveling across the ocean to their latest home.
“And from then on we led a different life,” says the centenarian, adding that she remembers “a lot” from the few years they spent in Tahiti, where they lived a country life in a grass hut, and that due to her education on the time, she still “thinks in French most of the time.”
There, the family met one other health-conscious newcomer: Edmond Szkeley, also generally known as “the Professor,” a Romanian immigrant and aspiring health guru known for his writings and lectures on philosophy and ancient religions, sports, and the worth of fresh, organic vegetables. They all eventually returned to the U.S., and Deborah’s family attended his summer “health camps.” It was then that Deborah decided to work for him, and he or she and Edmond fell in love. They married when he was 34 and he or she was just 17.
“I did it to get out,” she explains. “He was chairman of the British International Health and Education Society and he wanted to go to England. And I thought, ‘I’m going to England, and if it works out, that’s fine. If not, I’m free. I can go to France.’ And it worked out. So I stayed.”
Founding of Rancho la Puerta
The young couple were in search of a spot where they may arrange a health camp together and ended up in Baja, partly because it might allow Edmond to avoid the incontrovertible fact that he didn’t have immigration papers that will have allowed him to remain within the United States. They settled on an enormous piece of land on the foot of Mount Kuchumaa and wrote to friends inviting them to return and stay on the land.
“For $17.50 a week,” she says, “I was able to bring my own tent.” The whole thing went down well, she adds, because “my husband was very well known.”
They built their very own everlasting tents, which they soon replaced with cabanas created from surplus army boxes, then added vegetable gardens, fitness classes, a dining room serving mostly raw vegan food (today the menu is pescatarian), and a printing shop for Edmonds’ books. Advertising in Los Angeles attracted Hollywood audiences – as did the Golden Door, which Deborah created in 1958 after traveling to Japan a dozen times in a yr for inspiration.
The couple had two children, and today their daughter Sarah Livia Brightwood runs the resort, having planted 1000’s of trees on the property.
“She is the boss,” says Deborah. “She makes the decisions… I don’t interfere.” (One of her grandchildren – a skilled surfer— is on the board; the opposite recently graduated with honors from the University of Southern California.)
Today, Rancho la Puerta, which she calls “the ranch,” is “a little town” with 400 employees. It charges guests $5,100 and up per person for week-long packages and offers 20 full-time fitness instructors, 11 gyms, a cooking school, an organic farm, three spa treatment centers, programs like group hikes and workshops, and peaceful nature trails for walking — and never a single golf cart in sight. Of the ten,000 acres, only about 300 are actively utilized by guests, a part of a conscious effort to maintain the footprint as small as possible.
“We are not growing,” says Deborah. “We are smaller than we were, and we are doing so on purpose.”
Deborah is on the property three days every week and still holds weekly Q&A sessions together with her guests in a house that’s all the time packed, often answering questions on how she has managed to live such an extended and healthy life. People need to know what sort of water she drinks – a matter that makes her laugh – and what her skincare routine is, to which she replies: “Soap and water.” As she tells it Assets, “These are not my jobs. The fact that I don’t worry is more important than the water. I have really accepted what I can and cannot do.”
But truthfully: what’s their secret?
Her healthy lifestyle—including never eating pork and still walking a mile a day despite two hip fractures (she now uses a walker)—has actually contributed to her longevity. But Deborah knows that is not all: Her father lived to be 81, but her mother died of cancer at 60. Edmond died at 70 (after they separated), but because of his refusal to have surgery for an umbilical hernia. “He died of a strangulated hernia as soon as he got to the hospital,” she says. She outlived her brother. And then there was the best lack of her life: the death of her son (which she doesn’t wish to discuss).
But relating to having outlived so many individuals, Deborah says, “I don’t think about it. You just accept it.”
She tends to have much younger friends, which helps her. “I’ve always had younger friends – because of the conversations, the theater, the plays we see, the activities we do, you know? They’re in their 40s,” she says. “It’s fun.”
Her advice to anyone looking for longevity is to maintain the body and mind energetic – and to read so much, as she does, preferring ninth-century Japanese mysteries. “I like Buddhism,” she says. “I call myself a Jewish Zen Buddhist.”
For Deborah, nonetheless, an energetic mind doesn’t include brooding.
“The thing is, I don’t allow negative thoughts. We are in control. And we can say, ‘I don’t want to go there.’ You just don’t go. I don’t do that,” she says. “I mean, the world is a terrible place and terrible things happen all the time… But I try to help as many people as I can live healthier lives.”
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