Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (21 page)

Profile: Donald McEachern

Don McEachern defies the stereotype about older workers not being willing or able to learn new things. “I am interested in learning and understanding—every day. In fact, throughout my working life I have taken classes in special subjects that I thought would be useful—management, finance, marketing, engineering, statistics, physics, languages.” And useful they have been.

At seventy-seven, Don works full time at General Atomics in California designing advanced nuclear reactors. This requires knowledge of nuclear technology and materials, performing analyses, and conducting experiments. Funding mainly comes from the US Department of Energy.

After nearly fifty years working on nuclear reactors at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico and at General Atomics in La Jolla, California, Don has given up managing organizations and large projects in favor of developing new business, planning, consulting, and teaching younger staff based on his many years of experience with nuclear technology. His current title is Manager of Nuclear Fuels.

“The work is extremely challenging,” he says. “The nuclear business is plagued by many problems, as is well known. We try to solve those problems in ways that make the technology both useful and safe. We deal with costs, safety, environmental risks, efficient utilization of resources, and more.” Don was in Japan recently to attend an international meeting on nuclear technology and not, as I had assumed, to study the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. (In March 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggered a massive tsunami that killed thousands and severely damaged the power supply and reactor cooling systems of the coastal Fukushima nuclear plant.) Nonetheless, Don could give me a very simple explanation of the difference between Fukushima’s technology and General Atomics’ high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor technology:

Our technology is much safer than the type of reactor at Fukushima. At places like Fukushima, the uranium that generates the energy is contained in long, skinny metal tubes; the energy is extracted using water; the water is converted to steam that powers turbines for generating electricity. When Fukushima lost the ability to circulate water in its cooling system, the metal containers melted and the operators lost temperature control of radioactive fuel and materials. The H
2
O separated and the hydrogen exploded. In contrast, our concept uses ceramic material, not metal, to contain the nuclear fuel at high temperatures (higher than Fukushima’s reactors could), and we use helium, not water, to cool the nuclear fuel. If something happens, we
can
conduct the heat out of the system. There is no hydrogen to cause explosions and no problem with release of greenhouse gases.

There has been considerable interest in General Atomics’ technology, but it has not been widely implemented owing to a hiatus in building nuclear power plants in this country since 1975. Presently, four southern US states, as well as approximately twenty foreign countries, are planning to build electrical generation nuclear plants or thinking of building new plants to use in the so-called process industries. For example, the petrochemical industry needs a high-temperature reactor to generate hydrogen efficiently. The hydrogen is useful in many ways, such as making lower-grade petroleum that can be turned into lubricants, oils, gases, and greases.

Don plans to continue working at least one more year. Is he afraid of retiring? Yes, he thinks he is. “I am not happy unless I am busy and the work environment here provides stimulation not easily duplicated elsewhere. I have made work the center of my life and find working as an engineer more interesting than other activities. To be successful in the nuclear technology workplace, one has to focus on important issues and deal with them in the most rational and objective manner. I like that. One has to deal with facts, with real issues. There is no room for posturing or illogical conclusions. Working in that kind of environment is fulfilling. It is not like politics, which I find appalling. Also, there are certain social rewards associated with the workplace where thoughtful people concentrate together on a mission. There are opportunities to meet new people and share experiences. I know this can be done outside the workplace, but I am hesitant to take on the challenge.”

“I still have a lot of energy,” Don continues, “and I am not comfortable unless I have some projects to work on. The workplace is structured to provide interesting things to do. I am not sure that I would be successful in finding equally interesting and significant projects outside the workplace. Since I have not developed a great many competing interests outside of my work, no doubt I do not appreciate the possibilities of alternative activities.”

Although Don and his wife, Dixie, enjoy socializing and attending music and theater performances, most of Don’s close friends are coworkers. He finds younger coworkers—bright, energetic men and women—a pleasure to work with. The ones who have graduated recently know newer computer methods and other productivity-enhancing tools that he doesn’t know, although he assures me that he has a good working grasp of them. He considers mentoring General Atomics’ younger employees to be one of his major contributions.

When Don was studying for his PhD in chemical engineering in the early 1960s at the University of Wisconsin, there were no female students in his program. “It’s puzzling. In elementary school
girls
were the smart ones, and they were good at math. What kept them from going on to STEM careers (science, technology, engineering, mathematics)?” Today, engineering classes are about 30 percent female. Don sees no differences in the abilities of male and female students. He would like to see STEM education pushed even harder in our schools. “We are not growing enough STEM people in our country. We are importing many of them from abroad, and that is a real failing.”

When I asked Don whether he has noticed any changes in his life since reaching sixty or seventy, he admitted that he is often fatigued at the end of the day. “I look old and I am aware that I am old. That is the reality. Consequently, health and fitness are extremely important to me. I watch my diet carefully and exercise vigorously several times a week.” Don loves to go on trips sponsored by the Sierra Club that require strenuous activity. Most recently, he has hiked across the topmost parts of Scotland, canoed the Buffalo River in Arkansas, hiked in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy, and gone rafting in Alaska.

After reading my book
Women Still at Work
, Don told me that he found the women’s responses to my interview questions quite different from his. He thought their reasons for continuing to work expressed more affect. And here Don does fall back on a convenient stereotype: “What do you expect?” he seems to shrug. “I am an engineer.”

Other factors affecting income from the job are full-time versus part-time status and number of years in the current job. According to the most recent US Census, 44.3 percent of men and women sixty-five and older who participated in the labor force worked full time and year-round in 2011.
3
(The District of Columbia’s rate surpassed all states’: 62.2 percent.) The men in my study clearly prefer full-time work. Just under two-thirds of the men are working full time and 38 percent are working part time. Seven of the twelve men in their eighties-nineties are working full time. The rest of the full-timers are divided fairly evenly between the sixty- to sixty-nine-year olds and the seventy- to seventy-nine-year-olds. The pattern I see for older women is somewhat different. As is true of the men, there are slightly more full timers (53 percent) than part timers (47 percent) among the women. However, age definitely plays a bigger part in the women’s employment decisions. Part-time work is generally favored by women seventy and over, and women sixty to sixty-nine tend to choose full-time work.

Eighty-two-year-old Ed Myers of Austin, Texas, has three part-time jobs. He has been teaching in the water for more than sixty years. Serving in the US Navy before attending college, he taught naval recruits about water safety. Once he enrolled at St. Lawrence University, he established a swim program. Now, at a mature age and in very good shape, Ed is still teaching swimming and lifeguarding at the Town Lake YMCA in Austin, where he is beloved. But the YMCA job is only one of Ed’s part-time paid positions. He is a sales manager for a computer services company—an Austin-area staffing agency called Senior Work Solutions found the job for him—and he is a professional model for television commercials and print advertisements. He also volunteers his time instructing a swim and water exercise class for Alzheimer’s patients in the YMCA’s Senior Retreat program. All told, Ed puts in thirty-five hours a week or more and he expects to continue because he really enjoys it, plus the income comes in handy when he and his wife want to travel.

Another teacher (of the dry-land variety), North Carolinian Dr. Ed Neal, has been consulting in higher education on a part-time basis for the past five years. He was a recognized leader in POD (Professional and Organizational Development in Higher Education) when I was a rookie faculty developer in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Ed provided an honest snapshot of his career in faculty development, curriculum design, and higher education pedagogy:

Although I started my academic career as a history professor (in 1968), I became more interested in the dynamics of the classroom than in the exotic charms of my chosen field, so I switched to faculty development. I established the Office of Faculty Development at University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill in 1974 and served as the director for thirty-four years, retiring in 2008. I started part-time consulting outside the university in the early 1990s, so when I retired it was easy to continue the work (and, of course, there is no heavy lifting). Consulting is still very much a part-time occupation. For example, I’ve been working with the Biostatistics Department at Duke University for about twenty hours a month for two years, helping the faculty design and implement a new master’s degree program (which includes trying to train the faculty in effective teaching techniques). Every fall I teach a ten-class post-doctoral seminar, “College Teaching,” at UNC and I repeat the course in the spring for post-docs at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences. I also usually present four or five pedagogical workshops a year at colleges and universities in the area, although that kind of work has tapered off because of the recession. I became editor of the
Journal of Faculty Development
in 2000, and I’m doing a better job than ever before because now I have the time to do it properly.

I really love teaching (not only for the ego boost it provides), and I think I still have something important to contribute, especially since the field has been hijacked by a fascination with technology. I’ve talked with many people who work in distance education or who serve as technology consultants to faculty members, and I fear that at least 75 percent of them know nothing about principles of cognitive psychology and have only a passing acquaintance with the relevant educational literature. Even now, faculty members from UNC still contact me with questions and problems, since the teaching center has ceased providing individual consultations and is now focusing on “the technological enhancement of teaching.”

The number of years men have spent in the current job ranges from 0.5 to 73. The average is twenty-two years in the current job and the median is eighteen. What keeps the average and median low for these older men is their propensity for starting a new job in the same field or changing fields altogether (29 percent and 20 percent, respectively) after working for many years in an initial career. Examples of career changes include the following: hairdressing to film distribution, airline supervisor to crossing guard, practicing law to university teaching, owning a travel agency to K–12 teaching, health-care administration to historic preservation, practicing law to financial advising, journalism to political advising, engineering to university teaching, typography sales to house painting, costume jewelry sales to fundraising, and architecture to state government service. A sixty-eight-year-old who describes himself as an entrepreneurship and business plan consultant in this country and abroad has deftly moved from one business venture to another. He asserts, “I never had a ‘career’ of any sort. Instead I changed work as I got bored or discovered something new.” He lists his noncareers as mechanic and racing car team manager, securities salesman, insurance salesman, marketing director, sports car designer and manufacturer, lawyer, auto industry consultant, author, and publisher. This is a self-appraising fellow who wishes he had “patience, equanimity, and a less judgmental nature” instead of “quick reactions and knee-jerk jerkiness.” Perhaps he doth protest too much, for his impatience seems to have served him well.

Jim Fannin had been working for fifty-four years overall when I interviewed him. He had moved from the highest ranks of hospital administration to working in historic preservation with
and
for his wife, and from being a “suit” to doing an artisanal craft which also involves some heavy physical labor. This change from full-time work in one career field to full-time work in another was one of the most radical and successful I learned about through my research. Jim and his wife have so much cemetery conservation and historic preservation work they can’t possibly retire.