Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (3 page)

Yet another encore careerist is Sanford Moss, the tour guide I met at the New Bedford Whaling Museum where a group from the Framingham Library visited as part of our “one book, one community” initiative, Framingham Reads Together. (FRT 2013 featured Nathaniel Philbrick’s
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship
Essex, hence the trip to the whaling museum and “The City That Lit the World” in the mid-nineteenth century.) Sandy, a retired marine biologist who volunteers at the museum, enthusiastically shared his extensive knowledge of cetaceans, whaling, and scrimshaw. His baseball cap caught my attention, too, with its wry humor: “In Dog Years I’m Dead.” Sandy also shared some information with me about his background:

First, let me say that I greatly enjoyed the group of people that you brought to the New Bedford Whaling Museum last Sunday. It is always refreshing to engage folks who are interested in things nautical and who are smart and ask good questions. It is nice that you have such an interesting topic—older men still at work—to write about. I have no objection to your using either a description of your visit to the museum or my name in your book. After all, we geezers have to reach for every opportunity to grab a little bit of immortality!

In that vein, here is a little background information for you. I’m seventy-four (as of yesterday) and have been retired from university teaching (University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Yale, and Cornell) for about eleven years. Having been a marine biologist (shark and fish biology), I made a near-complete break with that background upon retirement due to a host of developing interests. The first of these was the operation of a small antiques business dealing originally with old hand tools. This preyed on my innate interests in history and my hobby of making furniture with hand tools.

About six years ago my wife, Barbara, and I took the docent training course at the museum. About 85 percent of the trainees from that program participate in directing tours of school-age children through the museum. Having interacted only with university students for forty years, I eschewed the school tours and opted to interpret the museum displays for mostly adults and adult tour groups on weekends (usually Sunday mornings). I also have worked extensively with the Museum Registrar, assisting in maintaining the order of the collections, and participating in installing new exhibits and tearing down the old ones. Finally, I spend one day a week (usually Thursday) participating in a “Scrimshaw Forensic Group” that is under the direction of Senior Curator Emeritus, Stuart Frank. About six or seven of us gather to examine items of scrimshaw that have been submitted for verification and analysis. This is a very interesting (and educational) exercise, and I look forward to it each week.

Altogether this volunteer work is pretty extensive, and the recordkeeping at the museum has me credited for between three hundred and five hundred volunteer hours each year. But I thoroughly enjoy it, especially since it gives me and my wife (who does her volunteering at the museum library) the opportunity to make new friends among the volunteers and museum staff, as well as to meet many interesting folks who visit the museum.

Returning to the discussion of aging and working, we find many different points of view. For sociologist William Sadler, Third Age refers to the maturing worker’s productive years after
forty
.
15
But productivity does not always mean employment. Gerontologists Dawn Carr and Kathrin Komp credit Peter Laslett with popularizing the term Third Age to describe “active engagement” during later life.
16
Yet, among the gerontologists represented in their edited volume, there is little agreement as to (a) what it means to be old, (b) when the Third Age begins, and (c) what active engagement entails. Phyllis Moen, for one, says the Third Age starts after retirement from the career job. She posits a life-course approach: once retired, men and women choose pathways, but their choices remain gendered—women responsible for hearth and home, men responsible for the family economy and “more apt than women in the Third Age to work for pay”—as well as subject to inequities based on race and class differences.
17

Acknowledging that the territory of the Third Age is “largely uncharted” and “not easily defined,” Graham Rowles’ and Lydia Manning’s chapter in the Carr-Komp volume lists multiple ways to demonstrate one’s “new, early late-life identity,” for example, through creative pursuits, lifelong learning, spiritual development, or expanded leisure activities. However,
participation in the workforce is not among them
.
18

In contrast, in discussing the ways society provides opportunities for older people to remain engaged and productive, a chapter by gerontologist Scott Bass lauds seniors’ capacity for
both
employment and volunteer activity. He mentions the 1986 amendments to the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act
19
that eliminated mandatory retirement for the vast majority of American workers as well as a set chronological age as a criterion for exiting the workforce. Pointing again to the pioneering work of Robert Butler (the NIA director mentioned earlier) who introduced the term “productive aging” (later amended to “productive engagement,” a more inclusive term that views older people as “assets and contributors”), Bass concedes that today, nearly four decades later, “we may not be much farther along in our discourse about significant roles for the aged.”
20

Psychiatrist George Vaillant is convinced that “successful aging is not an oxymoron.”
21
In
Aging Well
, he identifies seven major factors or “guideposts to a happier life” that predict healthy aging (from retirement to past eighty)—mature adaptations, education, a stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and maintaining a healthy weight. Also important are relationships to other people, preferably warm connections.
22
Vaillant extrapolated his findings about what is needed for healthy adjustment in the senior years from the comprehensive Harvard Study of Adult Development, which he directed for many years.
23
In 1967, he took over a longitudinal research project called the Grant Study that had been following 268 Harvard undergraduates from the 1930s. He then merged the study of the Grant men with the Gluek study of inner-city nondelinquent males that began in 1939 and with a study of gifted females, known as the Terman women, from the 1920s. This yielded a cohort of more than eight hundred men and women for the Harvard Study of Adult Development, as the project was subsequently renamed.

Several of Vaillant’s discoveries about the Harvard men who survived into old age are particularly applicable to the professional men in my study, notably the following: by age seventy-five, one Harvard man in twelve was still working. Of the twenty men still working for full salary at that age, most were self-employed—six lawyers, four doctors, and five CEOs of small businesses.
24
Vaillant’s opinion of retirement is unequivocal: “Retirement should be voluntary. If work is more fun, keep on doing it.”
25

Of course, gerontologists and psychiatrists are not the only ones with valuable insights into aging and work. Bill Bailey, one of my survey respondents, shared his thoughts on the subject with me. Bill is a longtime lawyer in private practice and now full-time law school faculty member and writer. “I had been teaching law part time at the University of Washington for thirty years when the dean asked me to teach full time. I was by then in a solid enough financial position to be able to absorb the substantial income loss. There is more to life than money.” Bill also wonders where the years have gone: “It is such an odd disconnect to be turning sixty-four. I remember vividly when my college roommate brought the
Sgt. Pepper
album back to our dorm room and played it in the spring of 1967. I laughed then at the ironic quaintness of Paul McCartney’s song, ‘When I’m Sixty-four,’ thinking that people at that age were only a short step from the grave. I have a far different take on this song now. As my ninety-one-year-old mother continues to demonstrate, successful aging requires a sense of humor, humility, and finding meaning in the simple events of everyday life. The humility piece is a real challenge to the younger self within, who beholds the appearance in the mirror and says, ‘Dude, what happened?’”

Even nearly half a century after Margaret Mead’s pronouncements about gender roles and aging, some things have not changed all that much. Many people still consider fifty to be “older,” and few would contest Dr. Mead’s point that most men have gone as far as they can go with respect to career building by the time they reach fifty. Conventional wisdom also says that fifty-year-old men want to work until they are sixty-five, whereupon they retire to a life of quiet and fishing.

Except, that is, for men who most assuredly do
not
hold those views. Take sociologist Richard O. Hope, age seventy-three, as an example. After many years of university teaching and administering Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Programs that train students for careers in public policy, international affairs, and foreign service, he is now drawing on his extensive knowledge of intercultural, interracial, and gender relations to assist Department of Defense efforts to expand diversity programs, as well as consulting on international affairs. His reaction to a question about retirement is this: “If you mean sitting in a rocking chair, watching television, and nodding off—no way!”

Profile: Richard O. Hope

A professional career path might have seemed foreordained for Richard Hope. After all, his grandfather, John Hope, was the first black president of Morehouse College in Atlanta (the historian John Hope Franklin was named after him). Richard’s father, an economist, taught at Spelman College in Atlanta and at Fisk University in Tennessee, and his mother was a college teacher, too. But the early years were not entirely easy. The esteemed patriarch of the family believed that his children and grandchildren deserved no special treatment, so they all went to public school in the projects of Atlanta and Nashville.

While at Morehouse College in the late 1950s, Richard participated in Crossroads Africa, a precursor to the Peace Corps, that gave him a taste of international work. While completing his bachelor’s degree, Richard became active in the civil rights movement. He helped to start a chapter of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta with Julian Bond, participated in sit-ins, and was jailed. After several years of civil rights activities, he decided to go to graduate school, and by 1968, he earned a doctorate in sociology from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Richard taught sociology in such schools as Brooklyn College, Morgan State University, Indiana University, and MIT. Soon he was teaching at Princeton and was involved in investigating interracial conflict on military bases and carriers around the world. Cognizant of lessons learned from the
civil rights movement
, he convinced military leaders to understand that working together across racial lines was not only the right thing to do, but also was essential to military readiness. Richard was asked to lead an interservice taskforce charged with studying causes and possible cures of conflicts within the military. This led to the establishment of the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI) in 1971 at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. The DRRI, renamed the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (or DEOMI), has trained more than forty thousand reserve and active duty military members and civilian employees of the American armed forces since its creation. The name change reflects the growing array of issues included in DEOMI courses, including the study of racism, sexual harassment, sexism, extremism, religious accommodation, and
anti-Semitism
. Richard’s book on the subject,
Racial Strife in the U.S. Military
, was published in 1979. In recognition of his work, Patrick Air Force Base dedicated a building to him in 2011, called the Richard Oliver Hope Research Center.

The largest portion of Richard’s fifty-eight-year career in sociology, public policy, and the academy has been spent at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (WWNFF), based in Princeton, New Jersey. Although he retired in 2010 after twenty years as vice president of higher education fellowships at WWNFF, he remains with the foundation as a senior fellow. A major thrust of the fellowship programs is strengthening the capacity of underrepresented minorities and women to pursue international service careers as public policy analysts and leaders. In his presentation at a UCLA conference, Richard challenged the country “to examine and renew its commitment to preparing the most talented students for the global economic and international affairs responsibilities that will occupy center stage in the coming decades. While efforts have been under way in recent years to educate a cadre of minority policy professionals in the international sphere, statistics indicate that minorities still remain greatly underrepresented at the highest levels of the international affairs hierarchy. A new /files/45/35/f4535/public/private partnership is required that will promote international career opportunities for talented students of color.” He went on to describe WWNFF’s programs that promote diversity for the twenty-first century and that can serve as models for expanding international affairs opportunities.