Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (18 page)

Yet another reason is using and sharing his experience in community organization. After attaining emeritus status at Harvard in 1999, Chuck continued teaching “Community Power, Decision Making and Education” for the next ten years. The course helped HGSE students understand the role of grassroots populations in community organization and development. It involved them directly in effective social action to solve community problems, especially those related to public education. When I asked him why he selected that particular course out of all the courses he could teach, he said, “There were not many courses at Harvard dealing with it. I felt it was imperative to help students understand grassroots social action.” From Chuck, students can learn the difference between an ideologue haranguing society for its failings and oversights and a problem solver who seeks solutions that are equitable to everyone.

Today, in addition to writing, giving talks, and consulting, Chuck sings bass in the choir at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where his wife, Mary Sue, is the music director. (They met more than fifty years ago at a church in Syracuse, New York, where Mary Sue was playing the organ—she had studied sacred music at Union Theological Seminary—and Chuck was singing in the choir.) They participate in the co-ed book group they helped to organize thirty years ago in their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Chuck is blessed by the opportunities that have “found” him, yet he continues to work hard and be as resourceful and independent as Dr. Mays expected a Morehouse man to be.

Septuagenarian Bob Schecter is a part-time, self-employed writer-for-hire whose business is called Bartleby Scriveners. While he enjoys the work and wants the income, he makes sure to leave time for volunteering, charitable projects, tennis, and Scottish dancing. He plans to keep working indefinitely.

Profile: Robert E. Schecter

Bob Schecter’s business is called Bartleby Scriveners, a reference to the title character in a short story by Herman Melville. He is by choice a part-time, self-employed writer-for-hire because (a) he enjoys it and (b) he wants the income. Bob writes books, articles, blogs, and newsletters for clients, some of whom are businesses and some are nonprofit organizations. One of his clients is the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), a research and educational organization that studies groups—often called “cults”—that practice harmful social and psychological manipulation and control. ICSA, originally named the American Family Foundation (AFF), was founded in 1979 in response to parents’ concerns that they were losing their children to organizations like the Unification Church. Bob helped establish and grow the foundation together with a Harvard psychiatrist, a personal friend, who had earlier published a report on the phenomenon in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
. Bob became AFF/ICSA’s director of publications. By 1990, however, the nonprofit was unable to raise enough money to support its small staff—even though the psychiatrist was always unpaid. That’s when Bob, who continues to abstract world press reports on “high demand” groups for ICSA, started Bartleby Scriveners.

It was not his first career change, however. Bob had spent several years (1967–72) at the University of Zambia Institute for Social and Economic Research in Lusaka studying the oral traditions of a small kingdom in Zambia. He earned a doctorate in African history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976 and went on to teach African history for a few years at two different universities. He left teaching because he did not really enjoy it, yet he remained keenly interested in Zambia and the friends he had made there.

Now seventy-one, Bob aims to write a book a year. With three books about business topics under his belt, he is now working on one about Massachusetts and the Civil War for the Massachusetts chapter of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, an organization formed by Union Army officers in the wake of President Lincoln’s assassination. “I am doing profiles of the ancestors of the present members who served as officers in the Union forces, as well as of noted general officers from Massachusetts. I will also include people and industries from Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire that contributed to the war effort.”

Fully half of each week is taken up by volunteering in the Framingham, Massachusetts, area where Bob and his wife, Mary Louise, reside. Bob is very active in the local Rotary Club, one of more than 34,000 Rotary Clubs worldwide whose members—1.2 million strong—are business and professional people committed to volunteer service at home and abroad. Bob has built support for a middle school computer literacy project in Zambia that became one of Framingham Rotary’s projects. Under his leadership, the club raised money at both the district level and internationally to provide computer education to poor middle school students in Zambia. “I enjoy the fellowship, the weekly luncheons, and the charitable work at Rotary. Oh, and I almost forgot, the mentoring. I mentor a fifty-year-old Nigerian man who runs a successful home health-care agency and is studying for a doctorate in music therapy at Regis College.”

Somehow Bob finds time to help the Framingham Public Library. Bartleby Scriveners gives time and talent pro bono, designing and laying out the brochure publicizing the library’s “one book, one community” initiative, Framingham Reads Together.

Bob plays tennis three days a week with a rotating group of eighty players. He describes them fondly as “old timers who feel lucky to be alive.” They are professional men and women, both retired and employed. “One thing that I am pleased about is that I have been consciously trying to improve my game, and it
is
getting better. None of the other players seem to be doing that! Unfortunately, I am not as fast as I used to be in the writing department, not as good at connecting the dots. Even though I have all the new technologies at my command, I have to hire someone when I run into a problem.”

During the years Bob spent at the University of Zambia, he met a Scotswoman who introduced him to Scottish country dancing, which he and Mary Louise enjoy to this day in Boston. I was interested to learn that Scottish country dancing is a social form of dance performed by three, four, or five couples in simple or complex sets. As such, it differs from the Highland dancing that is performed competitively or solo. I was also interested to learn that it was through Scottish dancing that Bob had met the Harvard psychiatrist with whom he worked at the AFF/ICSA.

Bob and Mary Louise make their decisions independently with respect to working, when and how much. Mary Louise retired six years ago after a long career teaching music in the Weston, Massachusetts, public schools. She juggles several part-time jobs now: accompanist to the school choruses in Weston; lifeguard at a wellness center’s therapy pool; director of a German-speaking chorus in Walpole, Massachusetts; and director of the children’s chorus at the MetroWest Performing Arts Center in Framingham. With a mixture of pride and bemusement, Bob says that Mary Louise is “compulsively employed.” As for himself, he plans to continue working “indefinitely.”

Bob has traveled to Zambia four times in the past seven years and plans to go there again next year with Mary Louise to check on the computer literacy project, visit close friends, visit the people whose history he compiled forty years ago, and see some new places in southern Africa. Unlike Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, who preferred not to do
anything
, Bob knows what he wants to do and gets it done.

Michael Avsharian, age eighty-two, is a classically trained violinist who prefers teaching young people to performing. He is also part of the three-generation executive team that runs Shar Music Company’s showroom, workshop, and warehouses in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shar is the go-to place for strings, instruments, bows, cases, bags, and other essentials for musicians. Michael vows to continue working “as long as I’m alive and can do it.”

Profile: Michael Avsharian Jr.

At age eighty-two, Michael Avsharian Jr. works full time at Shar Music Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where, as executive vice president, he oversees purchasing and does “general troubleshooting.” When I called to interview him, he was busy in the warehouse.

Today, Shar’s showroom, office, workshop, and warehouses are family run by three Avsharians—Michael Jr.; his younger brother, Charles; and Charles’s son, Haig. However, it was Michael Avsharian Sr., an émigré from Armenia by way of Turkey in the 1930s, who started Shar Music Products in 1962 as a small discount mail-order company selling strings to string players. He got the idea from Michael Jr., who had discovered that buying violin strings overseas cost less than buying them at local music stores. Charles took the idea one step further by proving to his father that symphony orchestra players were eager customers; professional musicians had little or no access to the variety of strings they needed in those days, except for those living in a few major cities. Michael Sr. set up shop in his house, offering low prices and quick turnaround service (trademarks of Shar Music to this day) and soon was calling on Michael Jr. for help. Ever self-effacing, Michael says, “I only gave technical advice. My father was the entrepreneur with the native talent. He was fond of saying that none of his earlier business ventures could compare to Shar, that he had his greatest success
once he
retired
.”

Here’s where the technical expertise came from. Although Michael’s parents were not musically trained, they loved music and raised two sons and two daughters who all were accomplished musically. Michael studied violin in his youth under pioneering music educator, violinist, and conductor Elizabeth Green, who had fortunately relocated to Ann Arbor. And, at the Meadowmount School of Music summer camp in New York State, he studied with renowned violin teacher Ivan Galamian, considered the greatest violin teacher in the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Green ultimately incorporated Galamian’s teaching and playing strategies into an instructional textbook that became a best seller. In it, virtually all of the illustrations feature the hands of prize pupils Michael Jr. and Charles.