Who’s retiring? Many prefer day jobs to afterlife of retirement

Eight years after he retired from Caterpillar Inc., and about a month after his wife retired, Ronald Boone decided to return to work.

Boone, who had initially kept busy by working with his Masonic organization, makes the obvious connection.

"We had never spent 24 hours a day together. If we were going to make it to our 50th anniversary, I thought one of us better go back to work."

His wife, Josephine, is more gracious.

"He had had the house all to himself for a number of years," she says. "When I retired, he gave me the same space by going back to work."

At 65, the age at which most people retire, Boone got a part-time job as a bailiff at the Peoria County Courthouse in Illinois. That was two years ago.

The Boones recently celebrated their 49th wedding anniversary. Saving a marriage was by no means the only reason Boone got out of the house.

Increasingly, it's as common to hear about people coming out of retirement as it is to hear about them retiring.

Of course, Michael Jordan couldn't stay away from his job. Neither could Ted Waitt, chief executive officer of Gateway Corp., who recently regained control of the failing computer company he helped found. They're both under 40, both rich enough to opt in or out of the workforce whenever they choose.

But the Ronald Boones of the world are a more common example of the trend than the young and the rich.

Not too long ago, the American Association of Retired Persons officially changed its name to its acronym, AARP.

"No one really retires anymore," jokes Karen Lentsch, director of an AARP Foundation senior employment program in Springfield, Ill.

With more than 40 percent of the organization's 35 million members still working, the old name no longer reflected the membership.

Last year, almost one-fourth of 65- to 69-year-olds remained in the labor force, according to federal labor statistics. About 14 percent of 70- to 74-year-olds were working. The figures reflect increases over the previous year, and they cut across income levels.

While Lentsch focuses on employing low-income senior citizens, she's seen the job market grow to include a wide range of working retirees, from retired business executives who return to work as consultants to grandparents who suddenly find themselves dealing with raising grandchildren and the additional costs that involves.

Evelyn Stafford, president of the Peoria Area Retired Teachers Association, says she sees that group's prospective membership pool dwindling because so many retired teachers choose to return to work full time.

"They're a different kind of senior; their needs are different. They're not ready to go home, sit down and garden," says Stafford, who at 80 has retired for the second time -- first as a hearing and speech therapist, then as a real estate agent. Her husband, James, an optometrist who is also 80, hasn't retired yet.

While demographers have noted increasing numbers of working retirees for some time, the confluence of several factors, including labor shortages and the Social Security earnings limit, has affected business decisions to hire older workers as much as it has affected retirees' desires to return to work.

As employers tried to meet labor needs, they also found they could often save on employee benefit costs by hiring retirees, says Lentsch.

The Peoria County Sheriff's Department has been hiring retirees to work as bailiffs as long as anyone can remember. The average age of the 20 bailiffs is 63; the oldest is 82.

Originally, the practice started because it was cheaper to hire a retired police officer as a bailiff than to assign county deputies to the job, says Chief Deputy Mike McCoy. Through the years, the hiring has expanded to include non-law enforcement retirees like Boone.

It's the ideal job for someone his age, he says. It's part-time, it's interesting and scheduling is flexible.

Or, as chief bailiff Paul Carroll put it, "It's important to me to be part of something, and mowing the lawn wasn't part of too much."