WORKING LATE Some Seniors Just Refuse to Retire By Michael Austin North Shore Magazine July-August 2001 In early spring, greenish-yellow buds dot the old trees that sway around veteran journalist Studs Terkel's yard in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. On the porch, near the side door of Terkel's blond brick turn-of-the-century house, a dog's water bowl is dry and the giant rawhide bone next to it looks like it hasn't been chewed since the day it left its package. It is a lazy day, bright and warm, with a hint of a breeze coming off the lake a few blocks away. A perfect day to nap. Or to cozy up in the yard with a drink and a book and celebrate a life of meaningful work. Your time has come. You've done your work. Relax now. But old habits die hard. "The Titanic went down and I came up the same year - 1912," says Terkel, the unsinkable chronicler of our times, who is 89. "Will I retire? Well, I'll retire...when I'm dead!" Today, like every day, Terkel has donned what has become his signature uniform: red and white checkered shirt, navy blazer, black pants, red socks. His white hair is thin now and long, like his fingernails. He keeps a black felt tip marker clipped to his shirt just below the third button. His rosy cheeks distract attention from his blue eyes, always moving behind silver wire rim glasses and noticeably bright and clear. Today, like every day, he is working. He follows no set daily schedule, but this morning he's been on the phone and now he is ready to talk about his new book on death, Will the Cycle Be Broken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith, due out on Halloween. Later, he'll visit his office at the Chicago Historical Society, where he has been the Distinguished Scholar in Residence since 1998. The Society is cataloguing the tapes of Terkel's interviews with everyone from former South African president Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., to Chicago cab drivers and window glaziers. Tonight he'll probably turn in early, because tomorrow he'll be reading some columns by his old friend, the late Mike Royko, at a Royko book release party at Borders on Michigan Avenue. The requests for him to speak and read and offer his opinion probably will stream in until the day he dies. Until the day he retires. Terkel is among a growing number of Americans who refuse to quit their jobs, even though they are long past the traditional retirement age. According to government statistics published in The New York Times, the percentage of Americans still working at age 65 or older has been on the rise for at least five years. Last year it topped out at 12.8 percent - the highest it's been since 1979, when the country was emerging from a recession. Practical reasons such as dwindling pensions may be enough to keep people working past retirement age but there also is a psychological reason: Work is good for you. Seniors such as Terkel and famed Los Angeles-based author Ray Bradbury, who is 80, have known this for years. Bradbury, who grew up in Waukegan and has written more than 500 works including The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes, turns 81 on Aug. 22 and has books coming out in October and January. He vows to keep writing as long as he can. "Well, why not?" he asks in a telephone interview. "You enjoy what you're doing, don't you? Well, why not do it until you're 101? George Bernard Shaw didn't retire. He wrote until he was 96 or 97. So, I'd like to imitate him. He's my hero." Each morning Bradbury spends several hours writing and says he does it for a simple reason: "Love and joy. If you don't like what you're doing, go do something else. It's very simple." Sandra Weintraub, a neuropsychologist and a director of the Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University Medical School, says a job, or any other task that gives one a sense of worth, is the key to it all. Those who love their jobs and are forced to retire often find themselves at loose ends. "For a lot of people their career is a huge part of their identity and a lot of their life is structured around it," Weintraub says. "When you retire you lose the structure, the recognition, the satisfaction that you got in a job. And it doesn't have to be only intellectual work. There are a lot of people who work in factories or sell cars and they love what they're doing and they're very good at it and then all of that stops and you get up the next day and you say, 'Now what?' It sounds very delicious to retire but...unless you have something to replace it, it can be a pretty dull existence. And it can become very depressing." It is quiet now in the big old house where Terkel does much of his work in his second-floor office. His wife Ida is gone - she died a year and a half ago - and the silence is broken only by Terkel's ranting and his whistling when he disappears for a bathroom break. Somehow you expect to hear a soundtrack when you enter Terkel's house of the voices he once promoted on radio: the folk of Woody Guthrie, the jazz of Mahalia Jackson, the blues of Big Bill Broonzy. And where's that noisy dog whose bowl and bone are on the porch? "I don't have any dog," Terkel says. The bowl and bone routine is "a gag" to keep burglars away. They've broken into his house four times already. Across his living room there are piles of books, magazines, newspapers and audio tapes. They are balanced on tables and scattered on the dark wood floor. A dozen or so plants in the bay window are in desperate need of a green thumb. But litter and wilting plants are details Terkel ignores in favor of the big picture: his work, talking to people. "My life and my work are one, you know?" he says. "What would I do if I retired? Vegetate." Terkel has spent his life trying to find out what motivates people and what frightens them, what traits we share and how we're different. He's done it on radio, on TV and in books, including the oral histories Hard Times (1970), which covered The Great Depression; Working (1974), which dealt with people and their jobs; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War (1985) about World War II. His publisher, André Schiffrin, director of The New Press, says Terkel pens a book every two or three years: "Writing books has kept him young, as he'd be the first to say. The last thing he would want to do is retire." Championing the underdog has long been Terkel's impetus. "One of the great rewards is, when someone who's read Working comes up to me on the street and says, 'I'll never again talk the way I did to a waitress,'" Terkel says. "Freud pointed out long ago that the two prime impulses of man are...love and work. There were not too many books about work and that's why Working had the impact it did. Working is an essential part of a man's life. A person's life. A woman's life." The sense of work as an essential part of life is also eagerly embraced by teacher Jerrie Lawhorn of The Hadley School For The Blind in Winnetka. Lawhorn, 83, is deaf and blind and has been for most of her life, but she has worked ever since graduating from high school, initially reciting inspirational monologues in her traveling one-woman show. She still works four hours a day as a poetry teacher for Hadley, her employer for nearly 35 years. About 25 students mail their work to Lawhorn for review and criticism. "Working keeps me active, and activity and exercise is supposed to keep everyone young," Lawhorn says in a voice that is sometimes deep and sometimes high-pitched and whispery, but never inaudible. "It keeps me interested in life." Lawhorn lost her sight when she was 12, but didn't lose her hearing until high school. One of her teachers suggested that reciting poetry might preserve her voice as her hearing began to fail. Lawhorn took the suggestion to heart and, after graduation, chose a most unlikely career; she became a monologist, writing her own scripts and performing at churches and community centers. "My first recital was very inspirational," she says. "I felt good up there. And I received many requests from other churches and it just went on and on until they began to call me a ham." Lawhorn has worked hard, despite her challenges. Once, at the beginning of her performing career, only two people showed up for a show. She had a choice: give in to the humbling experience of playing to an empty room and go through the motions, or deliver the best performance she had in her. She decided to give it her all and she's lucky she did; one of the two patrons was a promoter who liked her show. The jobs began to flood in after that. In 1983, through the "University Without Walls" program at Northeastern Illinois University, Lawhorn, at the age of 67, became the first black deaf-blind person to earn a college degree. Warren Haushalter, her academic adviser at NEIU, says he believes "she'll never retire. She goes on forever." Lawhorn reads braille and communicates through a touch sign language. A typewriter that converts letters to braille allows people who do not know the touch language to converse with her. At her apartment, a vibrating device on her belt tells her when someone is trying to reach her on the telephone or is at the door. Another device turns e-mail and telephone voices into braille. Lawhorn downplays her accomplishments, insisting there are many deaf-blind people more worthy of attention. She also is not afraid to talk about what might have been. "I feel that if I could see and hear I could have done more," she says, gold earrings with pearls dangling from her ears, a matching brooch accenting her crimson sweater. "And better. Especially hearing. I wanted to be in music but I have no hearing. That's why I chose drama. I'm not sure what I would have done if I had sight and hearing." She still plays piano, even though she cannot hear it. And she reads for pleasure when she can, but her students are her main priority. "I want to keep working as long as I can," she says. "If somebody tells me I'm not keeping up to par, then I'll stop." The same goes for Mil Grauer. He won't stop working until someone tells him he has to - and maybe not even then. The Highland Park life insurance salesman, at 74, still puts on a suit and drives to his Northbrook office a few times a week. "I've had a wonderful ego trip in the insurance industry," says Grauer, his gray suit and checkered jewel tone tie impeccably pressed. "As long as I live I'd like to be of service to people. I'll always be doing something. Work, to me, is pleasure." Grauer grew up in Glencoe and has traveled a long and winding road since graduating from New Trier in 1945. He joined the Navy at 17 and in his early 20s went to the University of Illinois. Then he became a wholesale grocery salesman. Finding the work uninspiring, he searched for something else. "I would sell 100 cases of canned tomatoes and I didn't have any feeling of being creative," he says. "I'd get the commission and that was it." So he took a test to become an insurance salesman. They told him he had the smarts but the wrong personality. Four years later he tried again and they accepted him. In the following years he rose to the top of his game, becoming president of the 23,000-member Million Dollar Round Table, a worldwide organization of top insurance sellers. He has come full circle today, doing the filing and routine tasks that he once had a staff to handle. But he's got a house on Sheridan Road, a place in Florida, and enough money to do whatever he wants in life, he says, so money is not the carrot that keeps him coming back to work. But life is not just about recreation, he says. It's about helping people and constantly learning and trying to better yourself. And, he says, even though he is working fewer hours, he is still learning about business. For example, he overcame a severe case of techno-phobia and bought a computer, which he is now learning to use. He's also purchased a Palm Pilot. "You have to change in order to keep going," he says, reaching into the pocket of his suit for the electronic day planner. "You just can't stand still. It may take me a year to get this thing going. I've run myself by 3X5 cards for 50 years. I just want to keep learning as long as I can." Back in his living room, among the scattered fruits of his labors, Terkel is talking more about his book on death. He is seated on a green couch with his right leg pulled up under his arm and the sole of his shoe resting on the fabric of the couch. It is a posture that looks more natural for a 10-year-old boy than it does for an octogenarian. Terkel is alert - even though he admits to being tired this day - and he rattles off opinions as if he needs to get them out of his mouth as quickly as they occur to him, or else. Across the room his wife's ashes sit in an urn on a window sill next to a vase of daisies, her favorite. He says he learned a lot about religion doing interviews for his new book. Not enough to convert a self- proclaimed non-believer such as himself, but enough to take notice and understand what it is that religious people have. "I find out that people who have a faith of that sort...ahhh, that does something," he says. "They have an easier time when someone's dear one dies or is dying. But...a guy like me...you know...it's rougher. You see? So, it offers solace. I know it does." Like work. And writing. And talking. Until there is nothing left to say.