Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (22 page)

Profile: James C. Fannin Jr.

In the 1960s, after Jim served three years in Army intelligence and completed a master’s degree in hospital administration at Columbia University, he landed his first job at a community hospital in Long Island, New York. Those were the “halcyon days” when Medicare was new and reimbursements to hospitals were generous. For the next twenty-seven years he served as COO or CEO of various other hospitals until mergers and acquisitions became the order of the day. As COO at what was then called Framingham Union Hospital in Massachusetts, he had a wonderful working relationship with the CEO that was interrupted by the unplanned early retirement of the CEO. A new CEO came on board, but he and Jim did not see eye to eye. “We were oil and water at best,” says Jim. “I decided I didn’t need the stress of hospital administration any longer, although I didn’t know what the alternative would be. And I was in my early fifties. Luckily, I escaped at the right moment.”

It was the right moment because Jim’s wife, Minxie Jensvold Fannin, and her friend, Monique Lehner, both trained architectural historians, had established Fannin-Lehner Preservation Consultants in 1984. Minxie had developed the idea of cemetery conservation after going to a Boston conference on the work being done in its old burying grounds. Jim agreed to take on the cemetery preservation work. There were incidents of vandalism and the ordinary ravages of time and weather taking their toll. Fannin-Lehner specializes in the field of historic burial ground conservation and historic preservation consulting. The firm works with architects, landscape architects and historians, structural engineers, and metal conservators and a historic masonry contractor on the different aspects of gravestone and monument condition assessment and conservation in New England, the Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic regions of the country. Consulting services include preparing documentation for individual and district listings on the National Register of Historic Places and National Landmark nominations. Minxie serves on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians/New England chapter and the Boston Preservation Alliance; is a member of the Collections Committee of the Bostonian Society; and is the former chair of the Massachusetts Senate Art Committee.

In the late 1980s when he became senior associate in the firm (Minxie is managing principal), there was no program available to teach Jim all he needed to know about burial ground gravestone and monument conservation and tomb and mausoleum rebuilding and restoration—all the methodical processes of cleaning, resetting, adhesive repair, drilling and pinning, and in-fills. His only training was a cartography course taken as part of his economic geography major at Dartmouth College years before. He could do the hand drawing and measuring required of cartographers before computers were available, but that wasn’t enough. Jim was fortunate to attend a two-week course on the conservation of outdoor sculpture put on by the National Park Service, which included a good deal about stone as well as metals, and he attended numerous other conferences and workshops on all types of natural stone. In addition, Jim found a fellow from Vermont doing gravestone restoration who would allow Jim to “shadow” him and, eventually, to help him to learn on the job.

One of Jim’s early challenges was restoring Eleazar Wheelock’s gravestone at his alma mater. Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth College, had died in 1779, and his and wife Mary’s gravemarker badly needed attention. Other notable clients Jim regularly tends to include two cemeteries in historic Salem, Massachusetts, where Jim has been working for many years and a cemetery in the middle of town in Granville, Ohio. “I have been working on stones there for twenty-two years. Our firm did an assessment of all 1,200 stones and found that nine hundred were in bad shape. So far, we have done all the ‘easy’ ones and many of the hard ones, but the remainder are a huge challenge.”

Jim stays current with changes in stone processing and adhesives and with strategies for preserving the built environment by attending annual meetings of the Association of Preservation Technology as well as any conference, meeting, or workshop concerning stone and collaboration with colleagues. The Internet is a plus, making the search for historic documents less arduous. Needless to say, one thing has not changed over time: stone is still very heavy. Jim, age seventy-seven, has to be able to lift stone fragments as well as eighty-pound bags of concrete mix. The weather can be problematic, too hot or too cold or rainy. Therefore, most of the physical labor gets done in the summertime; the recording of photographs, proposals, and other paperwork is done the rest of the year. Jim does have a crew to help him in the cemeteries, mostly academic types who are available to work in the summer. “It is quite a challenge to reassemble three or four pieces of stone. The people who work for us have to understand and respect
antiquity
. There is no protocol—you often figure it out as you go along—which makes for very little routine in this line of work. I find it very rewarding to take inanimate objects that are in terrible shape and get them to look good.”

In addition to scores of newspaper and magazine articles written about the firm, Fannin-Lehner Preservation Consultants have won two major awards for their work: in 2009 the Oakley Certification of Merit from the Association for Gravestone Studies and in 2010 the Paul Tsongas Profiles in Preservation Award from Preservation Massachusetts. The firm is also known for leading workshops on historic preservation.

The decision about when to retire will be made jointly, but Jim already knows how Minxie feels: “Retirement is a no-no.” To keep in shape for their physically demanding work, the Fannins cycle 1,100 miles every year outdoors, and take spinning classes at a health club. They get up at 4:30 a.m. most mornings to go to a 5:45 a.m. spinning class. Cycling not only increases fitness, it also reduces the stress associated with having too many jobs to do at once and needing to keep clients satisfied. “It is a juggling act. I thought the recession would hurt us, but demand never slackened, especially in Massachusetts. When the Community Preservation Act passed here in 2000, adopting communities had to assign a 1.5 to 3 percent surcharge on property tax bills for open space preservation, preservation of historic resources, development of affordable housing, and the acquisition and development of outdoor recreational facilities. There are very few corners of Massachusetts where we haven’t done work.”

The couple seems to make friends everywhere. They maintain friendships from their university days, from the health-care world, from the historic preservation world (including longtime clients), and at the health club. Most of the older friends are retired. When Jim and Minxie attend college reunions, all their friends seem to talk about are their ailments, which makes the Fannins even more determined to remain active.

They are visiting their son and his family in Hong Kong for a midwinter vacation, then, as Jim puts it, they will “get back in the traces” when they return. “The jobs flood in. We are booked into next year. We can’t retire. It wouldn’t make sense. And, in reality, even if we wanted to step away, there is no one to take over the business.”

A modest portion of the women I studied had, like the men, decided to start anew one or more times, sometimes because the grass appeared greener elsewhere, sometimes because job cutbacks or other fiscal exigencies forced them to start over. Consequently, even after many years in the workforce less than one-third of the men (25 percent) and the women (30 percent) described themselves as “at the peak” of their career. Aside from these similarities, however, there are differences with respect to time spent in the current job. The average time in the current job for women (16.3 years) is even lower than the men’s average. The median for women (fifteen years) is three years
less
than the median for men. The range for women—three months to fifty years—is wide, but it is less wide than the range for men. There are at least three possible explanations for the differences in years in the current job: a higher upper age for the men responding to my survey; women getting a “late start” due to breaks for childrearing in the past; and the greater number of full-timers among the men.

Whether by personal choice or, more likely, because of financial pressures, twenty-eight of my respondents (18 percent) also have a
second
job. Most of the men with second jobs are in their sixties and their jobs include: on-call firefighting/EMT, teaching/tutoring, music instruction and performance, writing/editing, medical review, event security, and outdoor instruction. The other ten men with second jobs are in their seventies and eighties and their jobs are mostly in teaching, writing, lifeguarding, acting, retail sales, and disability claim review. For psychiatrist Dick Winslow, whose profile you will read in chapter 8, reviewing disability claims for the Social Security Administration is a part-time second job. He is more interested in the intellectual challenge of the work than the income it provides. Allan Shedlin took a second job as a Trader Joe’s “crew member” to supplement the modest income from his primary job and obtain health insurance coverage (his profile is in chapter 3).

As older men and women have discovered, self-employment, consulting, and business ownership make it far easier to continue working and to maintain earning power. Entrepreneurs can parlay their considerable know-how, skills, experience, and all-important networking contacts into a new venture. It requires having the desire and confidence, as well as enough capital to get started and a product or service that meets clients’ or customers’ needs. The Small Business Association saw the number of self-employed people fifty-five to sixty-four soar 52 percent from 2000 to 2007, and that was
prior to
the Great Recession.
4
Seventy of my respondents (45 percent) describe themselves as self-employed or consulting, and the other 55 percent work for an employer. (The percentages are reversed for the women: just under half work for an employer and the rest are self-employed or consulting.)

Eighty-five-year-old Donald Brick is a silver entrepreneur par excellence. Until the demands of worldwide travel became too much for him two years ago, Don was president of the US branch of Hi-Tech Solutions (HTS), an Israeli firm. He relinquished the position to a younger man, whom he mentors, became special consultant to HTS, and formed his own company, Donald B. Brick and Associates, to build upon the systems he designed using license plate recognition (LPR) technology. He recently agreed with his wife that it was time to downsize and move to a condo, but he is not about to lessen his commitment to the business.

Profile: Donald B. Brick

It is very easy for eighty-five-year-old Donald B. Brick to keep up with new technologies—it is all part of his dual responsibilities as president of Donald B. Brick and Associates, Inc., in Burlington, Massachusetts, and special consultant to HTS, an Israeli firm. With a doctorate in engineering and applied physics from Harvard University and some sixty-five years of experience in artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and command-and-control research, design, and marketing, he knows all the fundamentals as well as the very latest applications. He intends to continue working as long as he can, as long as he is physically and mentally able. “I have a lot to contribute,” he says, “and I enjoy my work. I see how retired friends spend their time, and that’s not for me. I
have
things to do, so I don’t have to
look for
things to do. The business gives me a big reason for living. It keeps me out of trouble and makes me feel younger. And I like being with younger people.”