The Pains and Pleasures of Being "Thrown Out" at 65

"At My Prime"

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

At 69, the Rev. Shirley B. Goodwin fights for his elderly compatriots with a zest that captures the spirit of Dylan Thomas' immortal advice to mortal man. Forced to retire four years ago as social relations executive of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese-of Massachusetts, he has been crusading ever since against what he sees as the injustice of being "thrown out."

Says Goodwin: "I was perfectly healthy and able to do my job. In fact, I was sort of at my prime. I had held the job for 13 years. I dealt with everything from alcoholics to prison reform. If it had to do with people, I had to do with it."

Unlike those who give way to the depressions of unwanted retirement, Goodwin has found an outlet for some of his energies in his very anger. He has turned his white-shingled home in Lexington, ten miles from his old office in Boston, into a headquarters for his campaign to improve the care of the aged in his community. His initial target was Lexington's Golden Age Club, which Goodwin felt was not concerned with the aged poor, many of whom were forced to live on welfare. Goodwin helped found a rival organization, the Council on Aging, which obtained $5,000 from the Federal Government to begin to meet the needs of the majority of some 2,500 townspeople 65 and older. He fought successfully for the ouster of a town manager who opposed the hiring of a staffer for the council. Now local government puts up $17,000 a year from which the Council on Aging pays a full-time coordinator and helps finance such services as "Meals on Wheels" for the old.

"Things are improving because old people are fighting I for their rights," says Goodwin, "I make too much noise to be forgotten." Nonetheless, he is far from satisfied.

Although he and his wife Estelle, 67, live in relative comfort on their $900-a-month income of pension plus Social Security, he no longer is eligible for benefits he had in his old job, such as housing and car allowances and health insurance. He sees rising property taxes as a constant menace to old people trying to cling to the comfort--and memories --of their homes. Goodwin pays $1,500 taxes a year on his house and half-acre lot, which he bought 17 years ago for $22,500. "The city is spending thousands of dollars on conservation lands because it doesn't want Lexington to change," he says, "but it is forcing the elderly out of town with high taxes. The town is spending $15 million on kids, $17,000 on old people. Do you see a problem there?"

When not campaigning, Goodwin keeps busy cleaning up the damage done his trees by a freak blizzard last May.

He insists on cutting his own firewood "because it keeps me in good shape and I enjoy it." He thrives on challenges.

The Rev. Shirley Goodwin is raising hell from retirement.

"It's a Relief

G. Arthur Kuechenmeister retired 13 months ago from his $25,000-a-year job as a tire technologist for Uniroyal, with a sense of serious foreboding. "The worst part of it is the feeling that you're washed up, you're through," he says. "You feel that your life is over with, you're no longer a part of the team, the group. They don't want you any more."

But now that he has had a chance to savor the life of pensioned leisure (his after-tax income is roughly the same as his take-home pay the year before), Kuechenmeister finds the ordeal not only bearable but downright pleasant. "It's a relief to be retired," he admits in almost surprised tones. "I'm satisfied. I'm happier not working than I was working. The tensions are gone. If I want to stay up to midnight to watch a football game, I don't have to worry about getting up the next morning."

The transition from secret dread to relief was not abrupt.

In the first few months after retiring, Kuechenmeister would drop in at Uniroyal's international division offices in Detroit just to see how projects were going in his department. Having spent 39 years with the company, he could not divorce himself easily from "the things you started but weren't completed when you left."

Since last April, though, he has not been back. He prefers now to work in the flower gardens around his comfortable three-bedroom home in Grosse Pointe Park, read books and play with his daughter's six-year-old son. He keeps in shape with twice-weekly games of golf and tennis. He finds himself "taking better care of the lawn, the house, the cars." He and his wife Helen, 63, make occasional treks to Colorado and Florida, but he does not share all his activities with her. Says he: "We have made an effort to have separate interests so we're not together 24 hours a day."

One thing that Kuechenmeister is trying to improve is his modest portfolio of investments. "I have some investments that I'm going to seriously work at," he says. "This is an outlet I see that will certainly be taxing my intellect."

Kuechenmeister's feeling of contentment contrasts with the tone of an article he wrote last winter for Uniroyal's company magazine criticizing forced retirement. "The thing I was objecting to," he says, "is that someone picked a mandatory point. Age isn't a very good criterion." After reading the story, one of his former bosses offered him what might have seemed like a dream deal: a four-month consultancy at the company's Venezuelan plant. But the months were May through August, and Kuechenmeister discovered he no longer wanted a job that would deprive him of "the most beautiful time of the year in Michigan."

There remains, Kuechenmeister admits, a weed in his garden of pleasures. "Prices and salaries keep going up, but pensions don't," he observes. "I'm a little worried, but there's nothing I can do about it." One impractical dream: "If I only knew we were going to die at 70, say, we could spend all we have in the years that are left."

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