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Finding new ways to work and play After retirement, it's busy-ness as usual December 17, 1998 Dorothy Calloway started to work at age 9, when Jewish families observing the Sabbath paid her to turn lights on every Saturday morning. At 12, Calloway cleaned her neighbors’ homes after school. Waitressing for a local restaurant kept her busy through high school. Then she worked for 47 years as a ward helper and nursing assistant at Children’s Hospital. She retired four years ago at age 67. "I’d always worked, and all of the sudden there was nothing to do," she said. She had been looking forward to a rest, but she did not enjoy her empty days. Instead, retirement sent her into a serious depression. She went to a psychiatrist who prescribed three types of treatment: anti-depressants, continued psychotherapy and bingo. Among the jarring transitions and losses older people face, withdrawing from the working world is one of the hardest. To retire literally means to pull away or to go to sleep, but many in this active group of people need to stay engaged with others. As older adults remain healthier longer, they are being challenged to find new ways to work, to volunteer, to learn and to play. "One of the things that people have to be aware of is that aging is changing," said Steven Devlin, acting director of the Boettner Center of Financial Gerontology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Retirement is not your father’s Oldsmobile." Working at retirement About 75 percent of those 65 or older in Allegheny County are healthy, active and financially sound, according to a recent study funded by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation of Pittsburgh. Most investments and larger pensions helped to double the average income of the elderly in the 1980s, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Those figures are even higher for the youngest subset of senior citizens, those between the ages of 65 and 74.
While they have more employment potential than many of their historical counterparts, American senior citizens today have retired earlier than ever before, some by choice, and others by workplace circumstance. Forty years ago, 60 percent of all men ages 65 to 69 worked. Today only 28 percent of men in that age group are employed. Allegheny County residents have retired earlier than most Americans, due partly to the downsizing of the steel industry here. Only 10 percent of people in Allegheny County over age 65 worked in 1990, slightly under the national average of 12 percent. The average retirement age in Pennsylvania has finally leveled out at 61, according to Richard Browdie, the state’s secretary of aging, and is not expected to drop any further. What should change is the size and profile of the retirement pool itself, as the first generation of women to work widely outside the home joins their male counterparts in the transition to a different life. Both groups’ search for a meaningful way to fill their time may challenge the traditional separation between work and leisure. And it may lead some of them right back into the job market. Already, 40 percent of retirees would rather be working, according to a recent study by the National Council on the Aging. "They see retirement as an uncertainty, or even as a problem – something that will separate them from the kinds of productive lives they are capable of living well into their 70s and 80s," writes age researcher Ken Dychtwald in "Age Wave." Walter Shine, of Aspinwall, began his main career in the ’50s, working in his own retail businesses in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh for 30 years. Then he became a supervisor for a cleaning company, and when that job was cut he turned to Allegheny County’s Senior Training and Employment Program. The program brushed up his basic job skills, including how to write a resume and impress an employer in an interview. Three months into a county-sponsored internship at Vintage senior center, he was hired to help with the center’s adult day care program. The 69-year-old has since moved to a part-time job Downtown at Weldon’s, an office supply store. "I think it’s foolish not to work," Shine said. "It’s fulfilling not to be sitting at home." More and more of his peers share Shine’s attitude, aging experts say, based on the apparent halt to a long slide in retirement age. Corporations may still use their pension and benefit packages as a means to replace old workers with younger ones, but unemployed seniors are increasingly turning to self-employment, part-time work and consulting to keep active on their own terms. "I think attitudes and expectations about retirement are changing," said Robert Friedland, executive director of the National Academy on an Aging Society. "People have heard about the potential for not saving enough and about living longer, and they’re responding." "There are a lot of people within the aging population who want to work, but want to do it more on their own terms," Browdie agreed, though he acknowledged little has been done in the way of government policy or broad societal strategy to help make the best use of such workers.
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