Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (5 page)

Profile: F. James Levinson

Jim Levinson was one of many people in or near their seventies who responded to
New York Times
columnist David Brooks’s invitation in October 2011 to write a brief autobiographical essay on their lives to that point, an evaluation describing what they did well and not so well and what they learned along the way. Brooks suggested several categories of modern adulthood, such as career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge, and asked respondents to grade themselves in each area. He thought that engaging in self-appraisal would be salutary as well as potentially useful to younger persons who could benefit from their elders’ life experience. Although Brooks did not publish Jim’s “life report,” writing it helped Jim to crystallize his current thinking, especially about work and retirement.

Jim has long subscribed to the idea that life is circular, that the first half of the circle is for
becoming
,
doing
,
acquiring
, while the second half is for
being
,
giving
,
divesting
. Turning the “wheel” to make a circle takes conscious effort and hard work; modestly, Jim doesn’t claim to be doing that as well as he might. To the despair of his family who beg him not to take on an additional endeavor unless he drops two, he seems to add instead of cutting back. Still, at age seventy, what remains most important to him is living consistently with the values he has honed over a fifty-year career in international development (nutrition and public health). As he wrote in his life report, “Despite the in-fighting, the nutrition work, mostly in South Asia and Africa, plus university teaching, has been deeply rewarding and makes me feel like a citizen of something larger than a single nation.”

Jim lives in a house in the woods near Marlboro College in Vermont, the summer home of the Marlboro Music Festival. He plays the piano and sings, goes canoeing with his wife, and is still consulting part time on malnutrition and poverty in Asian and African countries, which requires extensive travel. He would like to be doing the tough but personally rewarding hands-on work that junior staffers do, but has resigned himself to writing government policy and preparing agency documents. He also teaches an online course on international nutrition to students located all over the world. He is nearly fluent in Urdu and Hindi and can sing in those languages, which, sad to say, often makes the Pakistanis and Afghans he meets doubt that he’s an American.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the Heroes Wall in his office clearly shows who and what Jim values most. There are photographs of Gandhi and Nehru, Vinoba Bhave, Mother Teresa, Rabindranath Tagore, Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Dorothy Day, esteemed philosophers, singers, musicians, and more. There is also a framed question posed by his older daughter Mira when she was a little girl to remind him of his calling: “How come you aren’t talking about the hungry children?”

It all started after Harvard, when Jim led the Krokodiloes, the college’s a cappella singing group, on a 1964 trip to India. There he became fascinated by the Gandhian movement and its offshoots, especially their commitment to social justice, economic opportunity, and sustainable agriculture. He was supposed to go to law school after college but “jumped ship” and took a job with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) instead. For the next five years he worked on a project in India to reduce child and maternal malnutrition. Then, he headed to Cornell for his doctorate in agricultural economics and nutrition with a focus on policy and planning.

In 1972, when he was just thirty years old, Jim was invited to head a new program in international nutrition planning at MIT. His first marriage (to Mira’s mother, Sati) having ended, Jim met and married Louise Cochran, who went on to a divinity degree, a fascination with Eastern religions, and team building counseling using the Enneagram, a personality assessment tool. Altogether, he has three grown children in what he considers his “joint family.” All three work in the public health field.

After four years at MIT, he went to Washington, DC, to head USAID’s worldwide office of nutrition. This was when Henry Kissinger was departing as secretary of state and Jimmy Carter had become president. Shortly thereafter, he was posted to Bangladesh to work on nutrition for two years. Bangladesh, in Jim’s estimation, proved to be an unhealthy working situation, one that brought out the worst in people. That posting led to what he experienced as a midlife crisis, one reinforced by an evaluation finding that USAID’s development program in Bangladesh had the net effect of
widening
not narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots, an assessment that gave no major USAID program in the country a grade better than “D.” Shortly afterward, an assignment in the Philippines only reinforced this sense of disillusionment: our government seemed to be more eager to support President Ferdinand Marcos than the desperate people who needed help to escape poverty. Jim concluded, “I’m on the wrong side!”

Small wonder that Jim soon came under the influence of activist Father Daniel Berrigan and Catholic Worker leaders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. He moved with his young family to Haley House, the Catholic Worker house in Boston, where he and his wife joined other activists in providing food and hospitality to homeless people and the elderly.

Jim and Louise also performed acts of civil disobedience that landed them in jail, such as protesting the nuclear arms race and South Africa’s apartheid. Ironically, Jim’s father, who ran a steel company in Pittsburgh and had been in the forefront of civil rights struggles in that city, was at the time serving on the board of a company seeking to export nuclear technology to South Africa. Father and son, who had been unusually close in earlier years, clearly did not see eye to eye on this one.

In 1982, after two years at Haley House, the family, along with two other families and several individuals, created Catholic Worker’s Noonday Farm in Winchendon, Massachusetts, where they farmed organically, supplied soup kitchens and shelters, and lived as a community for ten years. Jim also resumed nutrition work for the World Bank in Africa, which allowed him to contribute financially to the farm.

Because the Catholic Worker communities were interfaith, Jim also met Quakers, Protestants, and Buddhists who quickly became kindred spirits. He also met, while living at the farm, a young rabbi who rekindled Jim’s interest in his Jewish heritage—he’s descended from a long line of rabbis and cantors in Poland and Russia. The rabbi coached Jim in the oral tradition and taught him to lead religious services.

Although Jim was not ordained, he became a “Sh’liach Tzibur” or “Messenger of the People,” the spiritual leader of synagogues in Athol, Massachusetts, and Brattleboro, Vermont, for the next twenty years. This was in addition to his government work and, beginning in 1994, a long stint teaching nutrition policy and planning at Tufts University. Dubbed the “Activist Academic” in a laudatory article in the spring 2007 magazine of Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Jim expanded the reach and effectiveness of the nutrition program by securing internships for students and introducing a PhD seminar. In the article a former student commented that he was known to teach more than international nutrition, monitoring, and evaluation; his true subjects, she said, were peace and goodwill.

Jim expected to continue in the Sh’liach Tzibur role after retirement. However, when contract renewal time rolled around in 2009, Jim’s nonconformist attitude didn’t sit well with some members of the synagogue board. They objected to several things: the amount of time he spent on interfaith activities, such as organizing Jewish-Muslim interfaith services; his willingness to officiate at weddings and funerals and do pastoral counseling for people who were not paid members of the congregation; and his questioning of Israeli government policies.

No longer leading a congregation, Jim continues to officiate at weddings with his wife, is actively involved in Brattleboro’s Interfaith Initiative, and participates in leading Jewish High Holiday services in Athol. He and Louise are members of a spiritual group of a few families that meets regularly for deep sharing. They plan to participate in a new, collaboratively designed interfaith evening service at the old Marlboro Meetinghouse (established 1776) just down the road from their house.

Jim told me that the most satisfying aspect of his core work is seeing what his nutrition strategy efforts accomplish in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, as he gets older he finds that his energy level isn’t what it used to be. Getting up early and staying up late to meet a writing deadline are taxing. Whenever he can afford to step back from the consulting work—right now he is paying for weddings and home improvements—he would like to concentrate on what most nourishes body and soul and sustains the richness and fullness of life. Family, friends, spirituality, and music head the list.

Although Jim recently admitted failure in a valiant effort to learn ice skating, he has other projects up his sleeve and possibly a book or two in the years ahead. Additionally, he is committed to helping with his son’s project, Calcutta Kids, seeking to improve the health of mothers and young children in India’s slums. But Jim also is fascinated by a Hindu teaching about stages of life that has, as its penultimate stage, that of “forest dweller,” meaning a gradual withdrawal into nature and contemplation. He and Louise already have their dream house in the woods; they just need more time for the contemplation.

Role models and mentors were also very important to oncologist Bruce Chabner, director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Cancer Center in Boston. Early career influences started with his dad, a physician, and continued in the laboratories of top cancer researchers. Today a highly respected leader in his field at seventy-two, he considers it part of his job to mentor younger staff members and share his excitement over breakthroughs in cancer research.

Profile: Bruce A. Chabner

Bruce’s roots run deep in Shelbyville, Illinois, where his father was a highly respected physician and a man of great integrity. Bruce is still very fond of the Shelbyville friends he grew up with in the 1940s and 1950s. “We were kids together in that little town in the middle of nowhere. After more than seventy years, we remain very close friends, and despite living all over the country, we get together once a year, often in Shelbyville.”

Google Bruce and you learn that the mayor declared April 7, 1995, “Bruce A. Chabner Day” in honor of Shelbyville’s native son and his contributions to cancer drug discovery and development. You also find out that he is director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Cancer Center in Boston and professor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a coleader of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center’s (DF/HCC) Translational Pharmacology and Early Therapeutic Trials. He is the editor of the professional journal
The
Oncologist
, and he serves on advisory boards. For example, for the past two years he chaired the National Cancer Advisory Board, the group of experts that sets research policy for the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He is also a member of the Cancer Center Scientific Council at the DF/HCC.

“I love what I do, every aspect of my work
—
the intellectual challenges, the emotional challenges, and the clinical environment itself. I can’t imagine sitting home doing nothing. I will continue to work, as long as I can do useful things. The field of cancer research is dynamic and, even after forty-seven years, I find each day very exciting.”

Sharing his excitement over breakthroughs in the pharmacology of anti-cancer drugs, Bruce recently wrote an article titled “Not Your Father’s Chemo: Targeted Therapies and ‘Personalized Medicine’ for Cancer Patients.” In it he explains how advancement in understanding the genetic basis of cancer has led to the development of drugs that are specifically targeted to block the errant genes that drive cancer cell growth and survival. The article, which he wrote for his daughter’s website (
http://www.bfflco.com
offers cancer care and maternity merchandise), conveys his excitement over new technologies that are revolutionizing the approach to treatment of patients with leukemia, lung cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma.