Old Blues, Take Two:Elite Role Models in “Retirement”
By David Gibbons
Well over half a century ago, in the golden light of early summer, a remarkable group of young men marched into Yale to begin their college education. America was in the throes of “the good war” against fascism -- in contrast to the questionable one we’re engaged in now -- and many among these freshmen would join the fight.
Stanley Flink is a member of the Yale Class of 1945W, with its unique letter-designation as a “war class.” He and his classmates matriculated on an accelerated basis, between the classes of 1945 and 1946, and were given time off for military service before returning to complete their credits. Flink, now 82, still teaches an undergraduate seminar in media and politics at his alma mater. A few years ago he compiled and edited a book of his classmates’ recollections entitled Sequels and Second Acts. Flink’s World War II-vintage Yalies, having recently entered their ninth decade, are mostly retired members of the business and power elites — all male, overwhelmingly WASP, and graduates of Eastern prep schools. So while they may not exactly constitute a representative segment of today’s general populace, they provide optimistic, inspiring models of dynamic second — not to mention third, fourth, and fifth-careers.
The outstanding qualities Flink perceives in his classmates are energy, courage, and the defiance of time. In the book’s introduction, Flink waxes eloquent of their later-life pursuits:
If I had to explain the adaptation to new interests, I would suggest that time has sharpened our sensibilities. Our seniority can provide us with greater freedom. We can and do travel, widely and exotically. We also volunteer for public service without too much sanctimony, and we follow our intellectual curiosity down many corridors….The measure of achievement and reward is delineated by time and circumstance, which tends to veil our capacities. The veil is not, however, opaque. It lifts now and then, or it is parted by the passion we have brought to new careers, pro bono commitments, religious stirrings, and the lure of deferred adventures … The 115 members (including nine widows) of 1945W who wrote me regarding their so-called retirement years described unexpected opportunities and a talent for persistence….There is no lack of generosity. Small wonders and large ideas seem to follow. What we try to do in our senior years is limited only by physical well being. After all, imagination is always young.
These energetic octogenarians pursue hobbies ranging from stamp and coin collecting to woodworking, from horse breeding to architectural preservation and restoration — magnificent obsessions they sometimes convert into money-making ventures. (Making money, by the way, seems to have been an activity at which the members of ’45W were particularly adept.) One of them auctions some of the beautifully crafted wood furniture pieces he creates for charity. Another built a fanciful castle on a mountaintop featuring salvaged parts of distinguished old buildings that were razed. (The latter’s name is Peter Van Dyke Berg. and his project, near Walpole, New Hampshire, is called Rice Mountain.)
Flink divides his classmates’ pursuits into categories and organizes the book into chapters accordingly: politics, medicine, volunteers, the arts, writers, environment, building & handiwork, the sporting life, academe, philanthropy, wine and roses, seafood, sequels and miscellany, and finally religion.
Naturally, seafood is the first one to jump right out of that list. Clearly, it’s one of those categories created precisely for individuals who defy categorization. The seafood chapter has just two entries: one is from Howard Benedict, who, at 65, retired from a 40-year career in commercial real estate in Connecticut and moved to Alaska to start a seafood-processing company from scratch (a project that lasted 12 years). The other is from John Cheshire, who, in 1968, along with colleagues from DuPont, founded Florida’s shrimp-farming industry; Cheshire now spends his retirement years researching topics of scientific and philosophical interest, divining insights, and giving lectures on his findings to “anyone who will listen.”
Many of these Old Blues enjoyed lucrative careers in such conventional professions as law, advertising, business, and finance, then went into the arts — writing or pursuing their musical interests. Quite a few of them went back to school, including my uncle, Mac Gibbons, who was enough of a pioneer at this pursuit that he got prominent mention in a Newsweek article, along with his picture over the caption “Gibbons at Yale,” making us all proud of our family’s first senior student.
During the war years, William Waring spent only 16 months at Yale before entering Harvard Medical School under a special Army program to train doctors. So, curiously, he had a long career as an M.D. without ever earning his undergraduate degree; in 1995, at 71, he enrolled as a part-time undergraduate at Tulane (where he also happened to teach at the med school), eventually earning his B.A. in 2001. Subsequently he wrote a 300-page history of Tulane’s Department of Pediatrics, where he was its longest-tenured professor.
Philip Walker taught French literature for 33 years at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And then (he writes): “A completely unforeseen, irresistible urge to compose [music] came to me one fine day about two years before I retired.” He enrolled in the music department at UCSB and earned his B.A. in that subject in June 1995. He has been “furiously setting notes to paper ever since,” and has had several of his compositions performed — at his church and by the Santa Barbara Symphony.
Jonathan Bishop followed up an academic career in internal medicine, which included basic research in diabetes, with volunteer work to establish a mortgage-foreclosure prevention program as part of a campaign against homelessness in his area. His next act was as an environmentalist helping to protect Minnesota’s forest ecology, which led him to enroll as a graduate student in the University of Minnesota’s Senior Student Program. James Harford was an administrator in the Space program for the final 13 years of his career before retiring in 1989. He got a grant from the National Air and Space Museum, enrolled in Russian 102 at Princeton University near his home, and then, benefiting from Gorbachev’s glasnost policy of the early 1990s, went to Russia to research a book about their space program, which was published in 1997 under the title Korolev (the name of the chief designer and dominant figure in Soviet space flight).
William “Mac” Walker’s résumé is an impressive record of multiple careers. A sociology major in college, he taught math at a prep school, spent 28 years in the advertising business (and was fired), became a development and community-relations officer at a large community hospital, was a career counselor, and now volunteers at a local hospice. He writes: “While I never became a captain of industry, I did a lot of good and interesting things in many different areas, developed a lot of wonderful relationships, and survived a few horror stories which, today, are kind of amusing to recall … Financial survival is important, of course… But doing what I really loved each day made, and is making, the big difference.”
Gerald Daly had two distinct careers. The first, motivated by an ideological desire to help bring peace and freedom to the world, was a 12-year stint, until the age of 38, as a press officer in the U.S. diplomatic corps. The second, undertaken as a conscious decision not to miss his kids’ upbringing, was in business public relations, the final 16 years as a freelancer. “Was going to a second career the right thing to do?” he reflects. “I have said many, many times that, if there had been no kids in the picture, I would have stayed in the Foreign Service. We lived high on the hog, had extremely interesting experiences, became fluent in foreign languages, and traveled widely. As it turned out, however, my second career proved equally interesting, and I succeeded in achieving my objective of being around a lot while my kids were growing up.” Daly fulfilled his determination not to follow in the path of his father, a hard-working commuter who virtually never saw his children during the week.
Arnold Simon of Los Angeles has had three acts: 20 years as an engineer, 28 years as a lawyer, and the rest as a writer. He studied creative writing at UCLA; then, by his own account, spent five years thinking about and two years writing a historical novel entitled A Break in the Storm, about Hitler’s 1936 reoccupation of the Rhineland (published and available through amazon.com or the book’s eponymous Website.)
Applying their time-honed skills to volunteer work in their communities is one heartwarming aspect of these men’s second acts — what prompted Flink’s description of “public service without too much sanctimony.” Although never trained as an accountant, Clarence Spangle retired for the first time in 1985 as CEO of Memorex (you remember their ads featuring Ella Fitzgerald’s piercing high note: “Is it live or is it Memorex?”) and for the second time, in 2001, as a consultant and member of some 17 corporate boards; he now applies his business acumen to preparing tax returns for other seniors and low-income people on a volunteer basis near his home in Vero Beach, Florida.
Roger Bachman of Portland, Oregon, shut his ad agency at the age of 64 and went to work as a full-time volunteer environmentalist, specifically a water policy advocate (a/k/a lobbyist) and member of Oregon’s Water Resources Commission. Conrad Wogrin, for 40 years a college professor of computer science, now designs and activates Websites pro bono — a rare skill for a man of his generation. Many of Wogrin’s classmates, among them several of the aforementioned captains of industry, wryly quip about being computer dummies and having to learn how to use these newfangled machines from various and sundry underlings, youngsters, and so forth.
F. Steele Blackall III might qualify under a number of Flink’s chapter headings. He sold his family machine-tooling and precision-instrument firm after 22 years as CEO and went into a spate of pro bono ventures too numerous to list here. The part of what he terms his “multi-faceted second career” that landed him in the wine-and-roses category is a series of monthly articles he writes for local newspapers, indulging his lifelong hobby of wine connoisseurship (without the snobbery). John Finley retired in 1983 as an overseas executive with Exxon and acquired property in Virginia, building a wine business — including a vineyard, winery, and a local co-op — from the ground up. He sold it after 10 years and looks back fondly on the enterprise as a rewarding challenge — except perhaps the 120 hours per week he and his wife spent tending the vines, including a weekly 4 a.m. spraying.
Who said retirement was but an idle stroll in the park or a quiet afternoon at the shuffleboard court? Certainly not these Old Blues, who use their prodigious reserves of creativity, spirit, and generosity to find second acts that are fascinating, worthwhile, and valuable, both to themselves and to others. May they be an inspiration to us all.
More Second Acts Literature
There are at least two other books in print with the phrase Second Acts as their title: one a work of biographical journalism by Mark K. Updegrove, subtitled Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, the other a practical self-help guide by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine, subtitled Creating the Life You Really Want, Building the Career You Truly Desire. In addition, Mark Freedman, founder of Civic Ventures, has written two books: Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America, and Encore: How Baby Boomers Are Inventing the Next Stage of Work. Civic Ventures is a think tank promoting our society’s recognition and use of the wisdom and experience of people 50 and older. In conjunction with its work, Freedman helped create the Experience Corps, a nonprofit national-service program engaging 50-plus Americans, and The Purpose Prize, which recognizes social innovators over 60.
David Gibbons, a 1979 graduate of Yale, is a freelance editor and writer who recently celebrated his 50th birthday.
