Volume 4, Number 11 - Spring 1973
Stop Worrying and Start Planning By Marge Lyon
Stop shuddering at the thought of retirement. Those years can be happy ones if you plan for them, starting now. It’s later than you think.
For example, consider my friend, Dr. Gertrude Laws, whose gabled stone house stands in 10 acres of woods near here in the Ozark mountains. Dr. Laws has been in the hills five years. At 61, when she found she had to "push herself," she decided that her years for spiritual development (or retirement) had come.
It was not easy to separate herself from home and friends at the top of her profession. For nine years she had been director of education for women in the Pasadena (Cal.) city schools. Before that, she had been chief of the bureau of parent education in the California state department of education and, earlier, principal of the demonstration school and head of the education department of San Diego State college.
Holding a doctor’s degree in education, Miss Laws has taught many lessons to adults, but none more important than the lesson in retirement she now teaches by example.
She had definite ideas about her years of spiritual development. One must have peace, quiet, space, and time to get the most from them, and she chose the Ozarks as the spot where those blessings could be found. Here she came and here she is, a shining example of how to be happy in retirement.
Trim and erect, she drives her little green car around our hairpin curves, taking a loaf of her homemade bread to a neighbor, hurrying to make a speech at a school or club, or just going to a social luncheon-and-samba. Respected, honored, and admired, eagerly sought as a delightful dinner guest, consulted on every question from cooking, her new accomplishment, to national affairs, she is as important in our communtiy as our oldest inhabitant.
She looks 20 years younger than her actual age, and her health is sound. Dr. Laws is as free as the wild birds she feeds. No telephone slashes the quiet hours in which she can enjoy new books from the regional library, read a dozen magazines and three daily papers, and listen to the radio. She has time, too, to study animal tracks and to view with awe the moods of the weather and the seasons.
Someone once asked what she does for amusement. "I go to the mailbox," she replied. She was not joking. The curving lane over the ravine that separates her home from the highway is ever different, ever interesting to those with eyes to see. Dr. Laws is an advocate of retiring while you still will be missed. "Don’t wear out your health and lose your peace of mind for another four or five years’ salary," she advises. "Retirement is happier if you have health. Also, you are less likely to feel forced out."
It is equally important to leave the scene of your greatest success, she advises. If you stay on, with an eye on your old job, changes may upset you.
"Of course, you are reluctant to leave your friends," she continues, "but doing so has great value. If you stay on, you simply fray out. You will find it difficult to keep up with friends still on the job, and you may begin to feel left out. As years pass, you may find them leaving YOU, and loneliness can be experienced even in familiar surroundings."
Don’t think of this change of location as "tearing up your roots," she further counsels; think of it as transplanting yourself. Of course, you will have lonely moments but the effort to make new friends and associations in a new place will be stimulating. "Actually," says Dr. Laws, "it can be a bright new chapter in your life. And best of all, your old clothes will seem new to these new friends."
Don’t worry about losing your old friends, she adds. The art of correspondence is not lost
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and travel is pretty general! More than 100 of Dr. Laws’ California friends have visited her in the Ozarks.
In establishing your new home, don’t try to make it a replica of the old. Welcome the change. If you must choose between cheerful and serviceable furnishings, choose the gay ones.
This wise counsellor also has advice for the young professional woman: Build a reserve of inner strength, a philosofy of life, as you would build a financial reserve....
Another bit of advice is: "Be thrifty." Travel and good clothes are important, of course, but in your years of economic productivity, provide for years of spiritual development.
In retirement, she carries life insurance, a health and accident policy, and two hospital policies. With this security, she feels free to spend all her monthly income. If she has any left above her expenses and usual charities, she "gives it away.’’
(Note: Since Marge Lyon wrote much for the Chicago Tribune, this story may have been published there, or it may have been in some local publication or... maybe Marge just told it..j.r.d.)
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