This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Charles Smith, 87, who lives in Pennsylvania. After hundreds of unsuccessful applications in his mid-80s, he found work at the Lancaster County Office of Aging and makes about $30,000 a year. He and his wife live a frugal and somewhat comfortable life, though Smith said if he didn’t work, they would be much more stressed financially. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The job I have now is not the best-paying job I’ve ever had, as I only make a little more than $30,000 a year, but it’s the best job I’ve ever had. I go to work every day and know I’m helping people who are very much in need of the services we provide.
Still, if I weren’t working, we wouldn’t be quite so comfortable.
It’s been a long journey. My first job out of high school was when I was 18. It was with a large chemical company headquartered in Philadelphia, and I worked as a lab technician on a rotating shift.
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By the time I was 19, I was making more money than my father, but I was doing shift work. I got married shortly after that and started to realize that if I was going to do anything more, I needed to get back to school.
Back then, if you were 19, you were eligible for the draft. No one would hire me until I met that draft obligation. So I went into the military.
That went a little off the rails. I went downtown to sign up for the Air Force as a mechanic. I wanted to learn all about jet engines. But the Air Force office was closed. The Army office was open, and I wound up spending the next three years in the Army. Two years of that time period were spent listening to Morse code. We were intelligence intercept operators. We listened to the Berlin Wall being built.
I got out in 1962. I got a great job with another chemical company in Philadelphia, and I worked for them for almost six years. At the end, that company was going public, and the new management that came in found that I was trading shifts for the other operators so that I could go to school at night. Because they didn’t want us to trade, I decided to continue going to school instead.
I learned how to start a business, and I opened a successful water treatment business. I eventually sold it and ventured into the chemical side of water treatment.
I found a job with a company in New Jersey. They hired me as a district manager, and for the next three years, I built their business considerably. They wanted me to move to Rochester and duplicate what I did here. I told them I’ve got a family with kids in school here, and I’m not going.
Jumping around companies and facing layoffs
I went back on an entrepreneurial journey. In 1985, I started my own chemical water treatment business. I operated it until 2005. My business philosophy was that you need to develop the business to make it self-sustaining, not driven by chasing the dollar.
I started having heart problems and had a heart attack. It was time to wrap up that business, and I sold it to the young man with whom I had a joint venture for a while.
I lost money after that deal. My plans for retirement were disrupted by the poor choices I made in my personal and business relationships.
I decided that going back to work as a private individual wasn’t going to work. I didn’t fully anticipate I would start running into age discrimination, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
I went to work for a friend who was in a similar line of business for another three years before he sold his company to a national company. This new national company decided that they needed younger people in their sales force, and by this time, I was in my late 60s, so I was out of work.
I bounced around with another couple of companies that would hire me. It was a pattern of them trying to learn as much as they could from me, then terminating my employment and eliminating my position. This went on in my 70s.
By my early 80s, it got to the point where no one was going to hire me. I had four different businesses that were all successful, but my age got in the way of landing jobs. I spent a lot of time on unemployment, filling out hundreds of applications with no response. No matter what I did, it just didn’t seem to work.
Three years ago, I had a serious accident. I fell on my face when I was gardening and wound up paralyzed. I injured my spinal cord. I spent a couple of months in a rehab hospital and eventually got myself back to being functional.
The fortunate thing is that my wife and I had bought a very nice house in a really good community. After the accident, we were able to sell that house, and the profit we realized from that was enough to buy another house with no mortgage. Each of us is collecting Social Security, and this small income from my current job with the county keeps us comfortable.
The best job I’ve had
I decided it was time to change careers. I saw an ad in the local paper in December 2022. It was not a well-paid job, but it was with the Lancaster County Office of Aging. I figured with them, I wouldn’t have to worry about age discrimination.
In February 2023, I went to work with them on initiatives that include Meals on Wheels, home assistance, physical therapy, and adult daycare.
Many of those we help are old and don’t have material finances or assets. Some are disabled. Whenever I think I’ve got problems, I just take a look at some of the people whom we provide services to, and then I realize my problems fade into the background. It’s really rewarding to know that what you do makes a difference in someone’s life, who would be pretty miserable without the programs we administer.
I work five days a week for seven and a half hours a day, which doesn’t leave a lot of time between my work schedule and recovering from the injury. I do try to reserve some personal time.
We do get out of the house with other people. We have friends who live nearby, and I try to achieve a pretty good work-personal time balance. I recently went down to Delaware and took a walking tour using a type of walker with a seat on it. One of my friends and I share an interest in photography, and we each have some high-end photographic equipment. I spend a lot of my free time processing photos, and I’m pretty proficient in Photoshop.
We get almost $40,000 in Social Security income between the two of us, so with this income, we’ve got about $70,000 coming in a year. We’re trying to save that for our actual old age.
