Introduction

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

—David McCullough, Historian

Wall Street is said to be buoyant. Corporate profits as a share of national income are at a record high last seen in 1950. At the same time, job growth remains stalled and 700,000 layoffs are anticipated as $85 billion in automatic cuts to the federal budget ("sequestration") kick in. In this thorny context, it is remarkable that labor force growth rates for older men and older women, taken separately or combined, are greater than for any of the younger groups participating in or endeavoring to participate in the US workforce. This phenomenon can be explained only partially by Americans' greater longevity and by the arrival of the leading edge of the baby boomer cohort in the senior ranks. There is far more to it.

Men Still at Work: Professionals over Sixty and on the Job shows how older men are prospering in the paid workforce, particularly those who are well educated and in professional jobs, despite the recession of 2007–9 and the economic downturn that has persisted in its wake. (The recession may have ended and the stock market appears to have recovered, yet employment has not rebounded to former levels, home foreclosures are still numerous, and credit remains extremely tight.) Older men are the second-fastest growing segment of the US labor force because the participation rate of older females is even higher. This book highlights important factors that are sparking this phenomenon and influencing the timing of retirement for older men. It uncovers their reasons for opting to work well past conventional retirement age, for example, contributing experience, know-how, and institutional knowledge, not just making money (which some excel at doing)—and tells how they balance the demands of work, family, and the wider community with personal interests and needs. And, throughout, it makes a special point of comparing the genders on such measures as career field, length of career, time out for caregiving, employment status, and earning power. It identifies similarities and differences in the careers of older men and women—in particular, who and what influenced or encouraged them along the way and what motivates them to continue working. In so doing, it continues the narrative presented in Women Still at Work: Professionals over Sixty and on the Job.

Many well-known American men work past conventional retirement age. Composer Elliott Carter, who died recently at 103, worked almost to the very end of his life. Seth Glickenhaus, a ninety-eight-year-old money manager who started his career on Wall Street as a messenger, is in the process of selling his advisory firm to a firm led by retirement money manager Marvin Schwartz, who is a mere seventy-two. Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk and Good News Garage fame are seventy-six and sixty-four, respectively, and still working even though they are not making new radio shows. Framingham's Danforth Museum of Art recently featured the work of ninety-year-old Bostonian John Wilson, the sculptor whose bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. stands in the Rotunda of the US Capitol. (On Inauguration Day, President Obama paused in the Capitol Rotunda in front of Wilson's dignified bust of Dr. King.) More than half of the members of the US Senate are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, including Chuck Grassley, eighty, and Carl Levin, seventy-nine. Forty-seven of the senators age sixty or older are men and twelve are women.

A completely random list of prominent older working men might well include: novelist Herman Wouk, ninety-eight; architect I. M. Pei, ninety-six; folksinger, songwriter, and environmental activist Pete Seeger, ninety-four; former POTUS, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and human rights advocate Jimmy Carter, eighty-eight; economist Paul Volcker, eighty-six; pop and jazz singer Tony Bennett, eighty-seven; business magnate Warren Buffett, eighty-three; stage, television and film actor James Earl Jones, eighty-two; author, historian, narrator, and lecturer David McCullough, eighty; country music singer-songwriter and film actor Willie Nelson, eighty; neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, eighty; economist, author, and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, seventy-nine; journalist, commentator Bill Moyers, seventy-nine; chef, television personality, and author Jacques Pepin, seventy-seven; blues singer and guitarist Bobby Rush, seventy-seven; actor, director, screenwriter, and author Alan Alda, seventy-seven; associate justices of the US Supreme Court Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, both seventy-seven; bandleader and jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri, seventy-six; columnist and political commentator Mark Shields, seventy-six; sportswriter and novelist Frank Deford, seventy-four; professional football and soccer team owner Robert Kraft, seventy-two; Vice President of the United States Joseph Biden Jr., seventy; Mayor of New York City Michael R. Bloomberg, seventy-one; political commentator David Gergen, seventy-one; humorist, author, storyteller, and radio personality Garrison Keillor, seventy-one; and violinist Itzhak Perlman, sixty-eight.

Less well known but equally impressive are the men who bypass retirement simply because they enjoy their jobs and want to keep working full time or part time. Income is certainly important to them, but they believe that there is more to life than making money. Or they agree with the late Pulitzer Prize–winning editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who lived to age eighty-nine according to his personal edict: "Don't just make a living. Make a mark."

Each individual has his own reasons for continuing to work, whether driven by financial or familial circumstances, or dreading what will happen if he stops—perhaps long-term unemployment or permanent joblessness, perhaps unrelieved lassitude. Here is what keeps Marc Mosko on the job. Mosko, a teacher of graduate courses in business management, marketing, creativity and design who also has a start-up company, told his daughter: "I work at age seventy-four because I don't know how to stop, and I don't like being too tight with money. Social Security does not start to cover the bills. But most important, work (if you are doing what you like to do) is very satisfying. So I continue teaching and am working hard at building an eBay business from home. This year it is starting to pay off as I am gathering a following of customers and learning how to buy better."

Then there is ninety-three-year-old Newt Wallace of Winters, California, who published the local weekly, The Winters Express, from 1946 until 1983 when he passed the baton to his son. After that, Newt Wallace wrote columns for a time and began delivering the newspaper in the Winters business...