Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (26 page)

Henry Schniewind, a psychiatrist, actually has two other chief reasons for working at age seventy-five besides helping his three children and their growing families: supporting humanitarian aid in a variety of forms and donating to a scholarship fund for older students at the Berklee College of Music that he set up a decade ago after he himself studied piano there.

At this point the travel involved in visiting each of the children once a year (in France, Oregon, and Florida) and the donations and the taxes mean that I continue to work. I consider it an easy obligation to pay back some of what I received all along. No one is self-made. It takes a “village.” So I am continuing to pay my “rent” to the “village” that helped me along in the hope that it will make the journey a bit easier for some other people. Altruistic? Yes. But since this feels right and is gratifying, I am not drained by it. I am fortunate to have good health still and to have my “marbles.” So why not keep working and supporting?

Henry admits to being unsettled for a while by turning seventy-five, becoming a grandparent, and ascending to the oldest generation in his family.

It was not easy landing at this stage of life. For the better part of a year I was rather out of sorts over it and not quite sure how to come to terms with it. Freud said the most important things in life are
lieben und arbeiten
(to love and to work). My professional training also taught me that one gets past this kind of denial by acknowledging and accepting what is, giving voice to it, grieving, and regrouping. That’s easier to say than to do, however. Then, one morning on my way to work, a poem came to mind that captured my reality and my feelings exactly and I burst into tears. That was the beginning of moving on into the next stage.

Here is the poem, “Generations,” that Henry composed:

We who confidently

Rode the crest of the wave

Are now about to break on the beach

And come to rest.

Quite a few men say they “love,” “like,” “enjoy,” or “have a passion for” what they do because it is interesting or fun. A seventy-two-year-old doctor says, “I love work. I can’t imagine sitting home doing nothing. I will continue to work as long as I am doing useful things.” Engineers seem to be especially content with their jobs, based on the frequency with which I heard the “love my work” refrain from them. (It occurred to me as I was reading a
New Yorker
article on the history of culinary revolution that the engineers to whom we are indebted for versatile and efficient kitchen equipment, for example, the microwave oven and the Cuisinart food processor, must have taken great pleasure in knowing how much their inventions were appreciated.
2
) That goes for engineer Don Brick equally well, the eighty-five-year-old self-employed businessman and consultant on LPR software systems (whom you met in chapter 6).

Like the men, the professionals who are the subjects in
Women Still at Work
cite myriad reasons for persisting in the labor force. Most commonly, the women find their work satisfying and meaningful when they feel they are being productive. There is complete agreement between the men and the women on this point: 91 percent of both genders give it as the top reason. They also agree about putting their considerable abilities, skills, and professional training to good use, although more of the women give it as a reason than the men (85 percent and 74 percent, respectively). For both men and women, enjoying their clients, patients, students, or customers is a very appealing part of the job. Sixty-nine percent of the men give it as a reason (taking third place on the list), and 80 percent of the women are in accord.

John Sayour’s credo is to find different ways to brighten the lives of others, whether they are his business clients, students, family members, or younger people he is mentoring. He is seventy-one and plans to work another fifteen years.

Profile: John A. Sayour

John Sayour started out as a street kid from the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. The neighborhood called him “Big John,” and the nickname stuck. He is still called Big John in the financial and insurance circles in which he works, even nationally. Something else that stayed with him from the early days was Red Skelton’s credo. In the mid-1950s when John was a teenager, he loved watching Red Skelton’s variety show on television. He would start laughing at Gertrude and Heathcliff, the Two Seagulls, even before the cross-eyed, wing-flapping comic ever said a word. What really affected John, though, was an interview Skelton gave right after his son died of leukemia. When Skelton was asked why he had gone on with his show so soon after losing his son, he replied that he believed he was given the gift of brightening someone’s life, and his son would have wanted him to continue doing just that. This made such an impression on John that he decided to adopt Skelton’s credo as his own. “It became my driving force, my mission to make someone smile, to make someone’s day brighter. I saw that as my job, and, after fifty-plus years in the workforce, I still do.”

John owned a ladies lingerie business in the garment industry in New York City for twenty-three years. The business was highly profitable, enabling John to live a country club lifestyle in a Westchester suburb. However, in 1982, when a study reported that the intimate apparel industry as a whole was growing at only 2 percent per year and his business was growing at 15 to 20 percent per year, he decided it was time to close up shop and find another industry. “It was just a matter of time until a larger fish would eat me,” he recalls.

John then joined the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (NML) in a Connecticut satellite office as an exclusive “captive” agent, although he remained his own boss. “I don’t like to have to answer to anyone. My freedom is important to me and important to my clients,” he explains. He stayed with NML for twenty-six years, producing at the top 6 percent of the industry levels (becoming a member of the prestigious Million Dollar Round Table), until he retired at age seventy. Retirement proved temporary, however. His strong reputation as a mentor/coach for NML agents landed him a new full-time job in the same field in 2011. The New York Life Insurance Company recruited him to mentor the carrier’s new agents in the Southern Connecticut office, and he continues to sell insurance and help individual and business clients manage financial risk.

When I asked John what is most fulfilling about his work, he said his greatest satisfaction comes from imparting good financial sense to his clients, for example, getting a young family to invest in insurance products. “I try to get them to shift money from spending on nonessentials (wants) to investing in savings for the future. We know that the top three necessities are shelter, food, and clothing. Too often for families, consumer gadgets like extra TVs come next. I want them to understand that
savings
should be number four. When it clicks, they buy into the counseling and advice more than any sales pitch per se.”

For example, John is a staunch advocate of selling insurance to parents on their children, after they have taken care of their own needs. He is especially happy for clients of his who purchased a policy for their autistic child
before
the disabling medical condition was diagnosed. The value that builds up in the policy belongs to the child. In addition, a benefit on that policy provides the guarantee that the child, as a grownup, can buy up to an additional $1.2 million of life insurance with
no
regard to the medical condition and with
no
rate increases. His future needs can be met. Those particular clients are eternally grateful.

In addition to his primary job, John has been teaching a course on insurance at Westchester Community College and an industry leadership course. However, he would like to teach undergraduates at the university level. When he approached Sacred Heart University about an adjunct position, he was told that he needed an MBA. He went back to their graduate school and in 2012 added MBA to the alphabet soup of professional credentials that follow his name—CFP™, ChFC, CLTC, LUTCF, CLU, RHU, REBC. The initials indicate completion of the many rigorous courses for industry education required of a board Certified Financial Planner, Chartered Financial Consultant, and so on. “This is the first time I’m actually
applying
for a job,” he laughs. “If there is a Sacred Heart opening, I hope to share my leadership skills and my business ownership experience with the students, most of whom will end up working in small businesses after they graduate. They will need guidance to manage and survive whatever is coming down the road in the next twenty-five years. You could say that their initial guidance will be my legacy.”

Another of John’s goals is to continue to grow personally and to continue to be important in people’s lives. As he has done for some forty years, John draws inspiration from and recharges his batteries at a retreat in the Weston, Massachusetts, Jesuit Seminary. He loves “people probing,” learning about lives. “I find the
hero
in each person I meet. Something extraordinary always emerges when I listen intently to their stories.” Big John’s four children and six grandchildren are spread out all over the map—Norway, California, Connecticut, and Vancouver. “They, and my working friends, most of whom are all younger than I am, think I’m nuts to keep working at the pace that I do, but they know it’s what I love to do and it’s the source of my energy and my enthusiasm.”

John would be in good shape financially if he retired. Despite having given up most of his clients when he moved from Northwestern Mutual to New York Life, he was having the best year of his career when we spoke. So long as his health holds up, John intends to keep working for another fifteen years. “I’ll be sharing the gifts that God gave me. Giving to others gives so much back to me.” To this end, he attends the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner annually, a benefit for the Catholic Charities of New York. (At the 2012 event, presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama delighted the audience with jokes told at each other’s expense and their own.) John liked to tell people, with a gentle smile on his face, that “Romney and Obama were joining him for dinner that evening.”

It would be easy to say that John practices what he preaches when he endeavors to impart the knowledge and skills he has accumulated over the years, but I much prefer the imagery he uses to describe his approach to teaching and advising: “If Reason is the rudder, Passion is the sails, and Kindness is the hull, we can sail the seas anywhere. That’s a sublime gift to give the world.”

Even when professionals are fairly well off, they can be working for financial reasons, such as maintaining health benefits. As a seventy-two-year-old businessman told me, “If I had a lot of money, I would not work. I would travel and write and keep fit. Now I need income, but I am lucky to be doing something very interesting.” Unless one happens to be ultra-rich and belongs to the vaunted “1 percent” of Americans, it is hard to shake the sense of economic malaise besetting our country (and much of the rest of the world). Few are immune to feeling little twinges or sharp pangs of financial insecurity. Let’s compare older men’s and older women’s finance-related reasons for working by viewing their tallied responses side by side, as shown in table 7.2.