Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (23 page)

Don was part of a cluster of Harvard postdocs who were hired by Sylvania in the mid-1950s to do research and development for the defense industry.
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Information processing was Don’s specialty. Sylvania was so impressed with the group’s work that it built a new building to house their R&D lab. An outgrowth of the ten years Don spent at Sylvania is the LPR software systems in use today on highways all across the country—think E-ZPass, QuickPass, FasTrak, TollTag, or I-Pass. Similar systems, in use in parking lots, parking garages, gated communities, and shipping ports, also hearken back to the pattern recognition work he pioneered at Sylvania. Image processing software for video security and parking and traffic monitoring and recording identifies vehicle owners to be allowed through a gate, charged a toll or fee, or detected if they try to avoid paying. An interagency group of thirty states shares the same type of violation enforcement and toll collection system.

Access and surveillance systems like these raise questions about potential invasion of privacy (questions I asked). Don’s answer is matter of fact: “It is being done anyway because of overriding safety, security, logistics, and law enforcement considerations.” And then he launches into a story about the time he was wandering through the parking lot at the mall while his wife shopped, and he was carrying a handheld LPR device. A woman observed his unusual behavior and told him to stop or she would call the police. He calmly replied that it was not illegal, but she called anyway. Soon, two policemen arrived and asked him to explain what he was doing. He did, and they became completely fascinated with the device.

Don is the proverbial cat with nine lives. Not counting his first jobs—at age thirteen filling orders in a wholesale drug company near home in Paterson, New Jersey, and at age fifteen selling shoes—he has made at least five major career moves, buying and selling companies, generally within the information processing systems field. One of his more short-lived ventures involved a computerized maintenance system for highway departments. However, maintenance workers strenuously objected to the tracking function, and it was “deep-sixed.” Between business ventures, he worked for eight-plus years as technical director at Hanscom Field in Massachusetts on radar systems and the command-and-control-infrastructure of the US Air Force.

He next consulted for a number of companies, one of them being Alphatech, a company owned and run by a number of present and ex-MIT professors who knew the business of government-sponsored R&D but did not understand the marketing of commercial products like the LPR system, a byproduct of the government R&D. Don took over that function. Soon, he and a few colleagues split off and formed their own company, which morphed into the US operations of HTS. Until the demands of worldwide travel became too much for him two years ago, Don was president of the US branch of HTS. He relinquished the position to a younger man, whom he mentors, and became special consultant to HTS and formed his own company, Donald B. Brick and Associates, to build upon the systems he designed using LPR technology. Nonetheless, there has been no letup in new ideas and challenges. For example, to expand into new markets and see those ideas flourish, he has had to learn both the shipping business (to implement container recognition in shipyards on the West Coast and in Europe and Asia) and the parking business. For all these accomplishments, the achievement closest to Don’s heart remains the scientific paper he contributed to the invitation-only Festschrift (or celebratory publication) honoring legendary Professor Norbert Wiener on his seventieth birthday in 1964.
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In this paper, Don applied Wiener’s nonlinear signal processing concepts to the detection and classification of noise-like signals.

Don’s wife, Phyllis, thinks he works far too much. She has retired from her job as associate director of the American Technion Society in New England (an organization that supports the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, a.k.a. the “MIT of Israel”) but keeps busy with fundraising activities. They do see their three children and seven grandchildren fairly often and enjoy attending their grandchildren’s special occasions and events, such as their youngest grandson’s high school basketball games. Don can no longer play tennis or ski since having both knees replaced, but he does try to go to the health club regularly. As he nears eighty-six, he is saddened by friends’ passing. He admits to slowing down a bit and says names tend to escape him at times. He really doesn’t feel old, even though people who look at him might see an elderly person. He and his wife recently decided to downsize, selling their home in Lexington, Massachusetts, and moving to a condo in nearby Burlington. “We looked at several attractive retirement complexes but decided against them because we couldn’t see ourselves surrounded by older people!”

Self-employment is a popular option for older men and women who have been laid off and for those who have retired but changed their minds.
New York Times
reporter Steven Greenhouse detects “myriad forms” of retirement behavior across the country. He highlights an elastic “in and out, off and on” pattern by which people
un
retire after retirement from a career job and start a new business or take a part-time job.
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Some may have “gotten the message” too late that having enough money to retire comfortably (i.e., maintain one’s preretirement standard of living) means saving more, so they are working longer than expected. Many people got the message when the recession put a big dent in their savings. As discussed in chapter 4 and documented by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, an increasing number of Americans (not just seniors) do not plan to retire until age seventy or later (26 percent, compared to 12 percent in 2002), and fewer intend to retire before age sixty-five (24 percent, compared to 50 percent two decades earlier).
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Although the Greenhouse article astutely captures the “in and out, off and on” behavior of retirees and
un
retirees, his examples skew to the
financial
pressures driving their decisions. Financial pressures indisputably are keeping many men on the job, but as we shall see in the next profile and in chapter 7, money worries are neither the top reason nor the only reason men give for delaying retirement.

Ted Grenham has retired and
un
retired a few times. His longtime marketing career at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) ended when he accepted a generous early retirement package. An encore career in real estate fizzled when the recession took its toll on the economy. Golf was really enjoyable for a while, but he missed work and the structure it provided to his life. Fortunately, his next encore career—selling outdoor equipment and garden supplies part time at Home Depot—has proved to be just right. Although he does not earn a lot, that is not why he is working at seventy-four.

Profile: Ted Grenham

After college at Boston University, Ted worked for a hotel chain for a few years. With the computer industry heating up, he went into sales at UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer I) for thirteen years. For the next twenty-three years, Ted was marketing director for various new software applications and hardware products at DEC. He marketed DEC products to businesses, colleges and universities, and medical centers, not directly to consumers. He loved it. “It was the best place to work!”

DEC was taken over by Compaq Computer Corporation in 1996–97, which in turn was taken over by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. After the second merger, Hewlett-Packard offered a very lucrative early retirement package to anyone over age fifty-five who had worked at the company for ten years or longer. Early retirees would keep all their benefits and any stock options they had. Ted was sixty-three and planning to work there for another three years, but the offer was simply too good to ignore.

“As soon as the early retirement program was announced, I knew I had to choose an encore career. I decided to obtain my real estate license before leaving Hewlett-Packard and was all set when the time came to leave.” Like his wife, Cynthia, Ted sold real estate for Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. He enjoyed working directly with clients, “people spending their own money.” After a few years, he joined a division of Coldwell Banker that was marketing new housing projects. “What really appealed to me about that was the fixed schedule; you don’t ordinarily have fixed hours in residential real estate. However, within two years the project was entirely sold out. There were no new or interesting projects available—it was 2007, the recession was upon us, the housing industry tanked—so I decided to retire.”

Retirement did not last long. In just two or three months, Ted admitted that he missed working a lot, even though it was the summer and he could have played golf every day. “Work is ingrained in me. I think not working is unhealthy. It is not about the money, it is more about having structure in your life.” A friend from DEC who had taken a job at Home Depot in Marlborough, Massachusetts, encouraged Ted to apply for a job there. He was hired to sell outdoor power equipment, grilling products, and garden supplies and has been doing that part time ever since. “My friend said it would be fun, and he was right. What I enjoy the most is dealing directly with customers, answering questions and helping people who are first-time homeowners. Having owned a home for over forty years, I have expertise to share. Even the occasional cranks don’t bother me. I just let the irritability roll off or get one of the new sales associates to deal with it.” Ted also is pleased when former customers return to the store to thank him and tell him how his advice worked out.

What Ted likes least is negotiating his time off. He and Cynthia take long trips to visit their children and grandchildren in Oregon and Australia every year, and the families gather in Cape Cod for a vacation every summer. Tuesdays and Thursdays are sacrosanct—they are his golf days in the good weather and his days for taking architectural walking tours through Cambridge and Boston. So Ted works at Home Depot on weekends and one day during the week. Conveniently, Cynthia usually works on weekends, too. Their grown children say, “Wow! This is what retirement looks like?”

Ted is pleased to tell me how Home Depot gave him and another older fellow a chance to prove themselves. It has turned out so well—they are still employed four years later while many of the younger workers have been let go—that the company is now willing to take a chance on other mature workers. Every new employee goes through a ninety-day trial period, especially during the summer. The company then keeps people on who are good workers. Ted’s pay is higher than minimum wage, but is certainly not enough to support a family. “That is not an issue for me, but there are many folks working at the store who are struggling to hold things together.” He is aware that many of his fellow employees are men and women who
have
to work, whereas he has a choice. “It is socially defining. A number of the employees are struggling with addictions of various kinds; some have no family or support system. I know I am much better off than they are. We get along very well, but that is a conversation we stay away from.”

I wondered how Ted feels about not having a managerial position. He assured me that he does not feel the need to be a manager. “I have a whole new perspective on working now. At seventy-four, I can relax and not worry about climbing the career ladder.” He does enjoy being one of a select group of employees who are invited to attend the “road show” of new products held at the company’s regional headquarters in Canton, Massachusetts, every year. Ted has also been recognized in another way. Twice in a row he has been nominated by every manager in the store to receive Home Depot’s executive award for outstanding customer service. In 2009, the very first time the award was given, the CEO presented it to Ted. In 2010, the senior vice president of Home Depot did the honors.

“Few salespeople select Home Depot as a career—they cannot afford to. But if you are not supporting a family and you have another purpose for working there, the job can be very meaningful. I do get a lot of respect.” That reminds Ted of something he learned years ago from a vice president at DEC who was his manager: the importance of listening to and learning from others. Even if an idea was the manager’s, they would think it was theirs, so the fellow had the respect of everyone who worked for him. This work ethic has stood Ted in good stead over the years.