Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (4 page)

One of the programs he administered, the Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship Program (named for Career Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering), has produced more than six hundred foreign service officers, including a number of ambassadors, most of whom are women and minorities. In 1990, when President Nelson Mandela heard about the Pickering program, the US State Department established the Public Policy Partnership in South Africa. Each year, these fellowships support two hundred undergraduate students through the master’s degree program, training them at universities in Cape Town, Natal, and (in this country) at Georgetown and George Washington Universities, for government positions in public policy.

Another initiative, the Career Enhancement Program, aims to expand the number of minorities and women in the academy, providing them with mentors and funding them for a year while they prepare for tenure. Some seven hundred faculty have received such assistance to date.

“Why did you step down from the WWNFF?” I asked Richard. “Twenty years is enough,” he pronounced. “And, there is an excellent staff in place to continue the programs.” His current focus is heading up a new foundation for the US Department of Defense that will support and expand diversity programs. He serves on the board of the Andrew Young Center for International Affairs in Atlanta. He may also become involved as a consultant to USAFRICOM, one of nine
Unified Combatant Commands
of the
US armed forces
, which is responsible for promoting a stable and secure African environment in support of US foreign policy.

Richard also wants to make more time for family—his wife, Alice, a retired schoolteacher, and their two grown children, Leah, a news anchor in Chicago, and Rick, an artist trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who teaches in Palm Springs, California, where Richard and Alice also have a house. The magnet is their grandchild. “Our three-year-old grandson has re-ordered my life and given me new priorities, such as making time to Skype with him,” Richard confesses with a chuckle.

Will he retire fully? “If you mean sitting in a rocking chair, watching television, and nodding off—no way. I talk about it with Alice and take her counsel very seriously, yet I will probably work forever. I have no plans to stop. First of all, it’s fun. While it is extremely gratifying to see younger people carrying on with this important work, I want to continue doing what I can to expand horizons and improve intercultural, interracial, and gender relations. It is important to contribute to society, even when you’re ninety, and I am only seventy-three.”

With that, Richard is off to a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations and to wish Hillary Clinton well in her retirement.

Of course, professionals like Dr. Hope and the other men in this book are lucky to choose between retiring or continuing to work. Many older men who would prefer to retire at sixty-five or earlier have to keep working for a variety of reasons, usually financial in nature, whether they like it or not. As we shall see in the next chapter, landing on the desired career path and finding job satisfaction and personal satisfaction over the years can be a real challenge for any man.

3

A Man’s World

I had run with him once before when I was eight years old. . . . I’d run two miles and when I stepped inside our cool, dark house, I yelled up the stairs to Mom, “I ran two miles with Daddy, Mom! I’m strong. I’m
strong
!”—Andre Dubus III,
Townie: A Memoir

Many an adult male can recall a father or grandfather who set an example that influenced his understanding of manhood and a grown man’s responsibilities, including the career he would choose (or reject) and how long he would keep working. For the quintessential all-American boy coming-of-age story, consider Gay Talese’s
New Yorker
profile of Joe Girardi, forty-nine-year-old former Major League Baseball (MLB) catcher and current manager of the New York Yankees. Read about Girardi’s Midwestern roots, religious training, devotion to family, education, love of sports, especially baseball (he played catcher in high school and college and in the major leagues for fifteen years), competitiveness, and close relationship with his father. Mr. Girardi was a bricklayer on weekends, bartender at night, and during the week a traveling salesman for a gypsum manufacturing company. According to the profile, young Joe tagged along on road trips and helped his dad on bricklaying jobs, building muscle in the process. In turn, his dad was the one who played catch in the backyard with Joe and took him to Cubs games. Girardi says his dad was always there for him, and he never wanted to let his dad down.
1

Joe Girardi was fortunate to have two parents who set positive examples in so many important ways, not only as paradigms of hard work but also of nurturance, guidance, and constancy. Many men in their sixties, seventies, and eighties today learned from their fathers about work and the economic responsibilities of a family man but were shortchanged when it came to paternal nurturance, guidance, and constancy. In the words of legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden: “Being a role model is the most powerful form of educating . . . too often fathers neglect it because they get so caught up in making a living they forget to make a life.”
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As Wooden well knew, mentors and role models can play an important part in career decision making of both professional men and professional women with respect to
career choice
,
conduct
, and
duration
. There is a difference: a mentor serves as an advocate, and a role model is one whose behavior is imitated. For instance, if your parent was a doctor who worked well into the senior years, chances are you will aspire to follow in his footsteps. Nearly three-quarters of the older men in my study reported having one or more mentors or role models at some point in their careers. Forty-three percent said their father or other male relative, such as a grandfather, uncle, or brother, set an example or was the primary source of support and encouragement. Twenty-seven percent cited a boss, supervisor, or employer, and twenty-five percent cited a teacher, professor, or college/university dean as positive role models or mentors. Other admired mentors or role models included respected doctors, wives, Woody Guthrie, Red Auerbach, Red Skelton, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Tom Hayden, Perry Mason, Harold “Doc” Howe, and Marian Wright Edelman. One wag said the “fear of poverty” motivated him to excel.

For Larry Lucchino, president and CEO of the Boston Red Sox, older brother Frank showed the path to higher education and his mentor, the hard-charging, high-profile Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, opened the door to the world of professional sports. Now sixty-seven, he is still trying to balance a twenty-four/seven job with the rest of his life.

Profile: Larry Lucchino

Larry Lucchino, president and CEO of the Boston Red Sox, cites two people who had the greatest influence on his career—his older brother by six years, Frank, and Edward Bennett Williams, founder and senior partner at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D
C. “My brother was the first in our family to complete college. Williams opened the doors to the sports world for me and had a profoundly positive influence on my career.”

Larry describes himself as a “transitional man.” He came from a working-class family in Pittsburgh and attended Princeton University on scholarship where he excelled academically and on the basketball court. (He was on the team led by Hall-of-Famer Bill Bradley that made it to the Final Four of the 1965 NCAA Men’s Division 1 Basketball Tournament.) Despite Princeton’s elite reputation, it proved to be a meritocracy in which Larry thrived. After Princeton, he earned a JD from Yale Law School and became a specialist in sports law and litigation at Williams & Connolly. Edward Bennett Williams, defender of high-profile clients and owner of two professional sports teams, the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Redskins, was his role model and mentor at the firm. (Williams was a workaholic who, despite undergoing seven cancer operations, never quit working until his death in 1988.) Under Williams, Larry prospered. By 1979 he was vice president and general counsel for the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Redskins. In 1983 he acquired his first World Series ring when the Orioles won the championship. Five years later, Williams appointed Larry to his position as president of the Orioles; and, after Williams’s death in 1988, he became an owner and continued to lead the process of building the acclaimed new-but-old-fashioned Camden Yards ballpark, for which he had the original vision. In 1994 he became an owner of the San Diego Padres as well as president and CEO and again led a successful effort to fund, design, and build a new stadium. He left the Padres in 2001 to join the new baseball ownership team in Boston.

In December of that year, John Henry, Tom Werner, Larry Lucchino, and a group of investors successfully outbid several competitors to purchase the Red Sox, Fenway Park, and 80 percent of the New England Sports Network. MLB approved the sale early in 2002. Henry became principal owner of the club, Werner the chairman, and Lucchino was named president and CEO. (Like Larry, John Henry and Tom Werner had experience in MLB before becoming stewards of the Red Sox.) Each has a seat at the table for all major baseball decisions, including acquisition of managers and players. Larry oversees the “superstructure” of on-field and off-field operations in all major departments, a staff of several hundred, and “a whole panoply of services.”

He feels blessed to have such an interesting career filled with hard work and the adrenaline rush that comes from “contest living,” a term coined by his mentor, Edward Bennett Williams. An intensely competitive person, Larry channels his energies in the sports management field. “A strong work ethic is part of my DNA,” he remarks. Equally satisfying is the knowledge that his work generates good feelings, not only for Red Sox fans but also in the Boston community.

In a
Boston Magazine
article in 2006, writer John Wolfson quoted Larry as saying that he “makes his living in the toy store of life.” Although that sounds frivolous, nothing could be farther from the truth: he is a hard-charging and serious person who is known for getting the facts straight. It just so happens that MLB is conducive to blurring the line between work and play.

Larry told me that he is proudest of four achievements over his career:

■
Breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” in 2004 after an eighty-six-year drought. “It was poetry, really. We came back from being down 3-0 Yankees to win the pennant in a historic manner, then rolled over the Cardinals to win the Series.”

■
Camden Yards—the design and building of Oriole Park that set the mark for ballparks. “It produced a sea change in ballpark architecture. After we built a traditional old-fashioned ballpark with modern amenities in Baltimore, twenty-one other ballparks adopted the formula.” And writer George Will, who identified baseball’s three most important achievements in the second half of the twentieth century as Jackie Robinson, free agency, and Camden Yards, seems to agree.

■
Preservation and renovation of Fenway Park, and his contribution to the pride, excitement and enjoyment of the everyday people who belong to Red Sox Nation.

■
Corporate social responsibility—the Red Sox’ owners using their franchise for charitable purposes, especially in support of the newly created Red Sox Foundation and the Jimmy Fund at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Now sixty-seven years old, Larry thinks that the days of “the proud workaholic” may be behind him. In part this may result from his relatively new status as a family man. He was a confirmed bachelor until 2002, when he married Stacey and became stepfather to her two children. After the Lucchinos moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, Stacey, a former teacher in California, became very involved in community and charitable work on behalf of health and mental health and inner-city schools. Larry is equally committed to community service, particularly expanding and deepening the Red Sox’ ties to the Jimmy Fund. “Dana-Farber Cancer Institute saved my life, and Stacey and I love the Jimmy Fund.”

Versatile as he is, Larry admits that he does not always maintain a good balance between work and the rest of his life. “I’ve been grappling with that my entire career. I have a twenty-four/seven job that I love, and I love my family and friends. It’s harder than ever to sit still and focus because I am pulled in so many directions. Private life comes in bites and interludes.” As a result, Larry is trying to delegate more. Fortunately, a cadre of very loyal people has been working with him since the Orioles and Padres days. When I suggest that such loyalty is a compliment to him personally, he deflects the compliment by saying, “Baseball is a glamorous business that offers attractive opportunities to people, and Boston is Mecca.”

To answer my question regarding thoughts of retirement, Larry points to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, who is seventy-nine and still on the job.
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Similarly, retirement is not presently in the cards for Larry. “I have high standards for myself. I like a bold way of living. If I just sat around, I would probably have little or no energy. My mother, who lived to be ninety-four, taught me that the secrets to a good life are staying active and continuing to grow. If and when to retire are the proverbial $64,000 questions.”

Jim Levinson can trace his fifty-year career in international development (nutrition and public health) to the influence of numerous heroes, role models, and mentors. Heroes included Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rabindranath Tagore, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day.

Role models included activist Father Daniel Berrigan and Catholic Worker leaders. Under their influence, Jim moved with his young family to Haley House, the Catholic Worker house in Boston, where he and his wife provided food and hospitality to homeless people and the elderly. Two years later, the family was living communally at Catholic Worker’s Noonday Farm in Winchendon, Massachusetts; they farmed there for ten years. Through the Catholic Worker community, Jim also met Quakers, Protestants, Buddhists, and a mentor, a young rabbi who rekindled Jim’s interest in his Jewish heritage, coached Jim in the oral tradition, and taught him to lead religious services. At seventy, he continues as a consultant on nutrition in Pakistan and Afghanistan, officiates at weddings, and conducts religious services, in part because the work is so satisfying and in part to pay for home improvements and for his daughter’s wedding.