Eightysomethings : These Folks Think <i> Retire</i> Is a Term Best Left to Cars

Many people look at their 80s as a time to enjoy retirement.

Cy Breen, 83 years young and the happy holder of two jobs, thinks otherwise.

His thrice-weekly commute, 2 1/2 hours in each direction, takes Breen from Cathedral City in Riverside County to the Encino office of Executive Car Leasing, where he has worked as a salesman for 32 years. A little self-pity would not seem out of order for someone half his age regularly enduring a drive half that long. But Breen, who also spends three days a week staffing a photo finishing shop he owns near his desert home, confesses he has never been much of a clock watcher when it comes to his work.

“I always thought ‘retire’ was something you did to your car,” joked the Arkansas native, who resists being cast as his office’s sage old man. “I’ve been called a workaholic, but to me that means you are pressuring yourself to do the job. I do it because I enjoy doing it.”

Two decades beyond the nation’s median retirement age of 63, Breen is part of a small and overlooked segment of the population: octogenarians who remain actively engaged in their careers. In the days before Social Security and pension plans made a leisurely retirement possible, workers like him were much more common.

Now, after three decades of steady decline, the percentage of Americans 75 and older who are still working has stabilized, due to increased longevity and improved enforcement of rules barring age discrimination. In 1985, 405,000 men and women, or 3.9% of the 75-and-over age group, were economically active, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By last year, the number had grown to 694,000, or 5.4% of the age group.

Such senior citizens provide a compelling crosscurrent to the tide of middle-aged workers who are withdrawing from the work world, whether by choice or because of corporate restructurings. For example, researchers know that older workers who have already survived multiple career-related crises tend to be more satisfied with their jobs than their younger colleagues. Studies have also shown that staying intellectually challenged, either through paid work or some other pursuit, improves a person’s quality of life in his or her later years.

“The message is that old age can be synonymous with competency, vitality and high performance,” said Helen Dennis, a lecturer at USC’s Andrus Gerontology Center.

Indeed, to spend time with these uncommonly active eightysomethings is to know the particular pleasure of individuals who have made peace with their career choices. In Southern California, for example, among octogenarians still vigorously at work are such people as Lillian Seitsive, a Northridge general practitioner who recently celebrated her 89th birthday; Larry Edmisten, 84, a Studio City probate attorney, and Marv Wolfe, 85, who came out of retirement to open a North Hollywood harmonica store two years ago.

Besides the blessing of comparatively good health, they all share a passion for their professions and work for pleasure rather than money. They attribute their ability to keep burnout at bay to a lifelong commitment to balancing work with travel, family, community involvement and hobbies.

Seitsive still remembers the day she realized her age had become an issue in her medical practice. A woman Seitsive had been treating for years informed her that she was switching to another doctor, someone younger, because she was afraid of being without care should Seitsive die or retire.

“That was 25 or 30 years ago,” she said with a slight smile. The patient tried to come back a few years after the defection, but Seitsive, feeling betrayed, refused to treat her. “I’m getting more used to abandonment now,” she said.

When you’ve been a doctor for 64 years, as Seitsive has, hardly a day goes by without some reminder of your longevity. Two years ago, when she attended the Class of 1931 reunion for the Medical College of Pennsylvania, only she and one other classmate were still practicing medicine. Of the 38 founders of Northridge Hospital, she is the only doctor who remains an active staff member.

If anything, Seitsive wishes she were busier. She sees only about 30 patients a week; she used to care for more than that in a day. The enemy is not so much her age--although she has cut back her office schedule to 3 1/2 days a week. Instead, she blames the rise of health maintenance organizations. Seitsive refuses to participate in such insurance plans because she believes they would force her to spend less time with each patient and compromise their care. The sad result has been that as more people have joined HMOs, her business has dropped off considerably.

“I like to do my job,” she said. “I feel robbed.”

Studio City attorney Edmisten graduated from Harvard Law School at a time when being a lawyer was mostly regarded as an honorable profession. Fifty-nine years later, he is doing his part to ensure that it remains one.

Sometimes new clients will come to him with their wills, and Edmisten, a former president of the San Fernando Valley Bar Assn., has to shake his head. The documents look to him as if another attorney merely printed the documents off a computer program without giving any thought to the individual needs of the client. Edmisten, meanwhile, delights in going beyond their boilerplate language.

“I like to get into creating something special for a client,” he said. “You can be creative if you want to take the time.”

A willingness to approach even the routine tasks of his profession with the fresh eyes of a young paralegal has kept Edmisten as busy as he wants to be. He puts in 40 to 50 hours a week at his Ventura Boulevard office because he loves the practice of law and hates the idea of retirement.

He still rises at 4:30 each morning and spends an hour working out with a trampoline and a chin-up bar, then another hour or two reading novels and newspapers. When he was 80, he started taking computer software classes after he couldn’t find anyone to program his office machines the way he wanted them. Last year, he spent three weeks touring Vietnam. It was the most time he’d ever spent away from work.

At the beginning of this year, Edmisten made a big concession to his age and the concerns of clients who worried he would not be around to handle their affairs. He arranged to have a young attorney, Karen Nielsen, work out of his office so his clients would feel confident there would be someone to provide continuity.

“I know I’m living on borrowed time,” he said without a trace of bitterness or regret. “Who am I kidding?”

Harmonica store owner Wolfe tried retirement for 20 years. He even enjoyed it. But when a man feels he has found his true calling at the age of 83, cruising around in a powerboat or a motor home just can’t compare.

That’s why, after two decades spent hawking office supplies and calculators and another two living leisurely outside of the labor force, he is working as hard as he ever has as the owner of a shop that sells only harmonicas.

The Harmonica Store is open five days a week from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Wolfe is always there to open and close. When the store is shuttered on Sundays and Mondays, he and his wife, Mickey Milgrim-Wolfe, are usually busy doing the books, preparing orders or promoting the harmonica.

“I can say I almost put all my waking hours into this,” he said.

Because he didn’t borrow any money to start his business and doesn’t rely on its sales to support himself, Wolfe is able to take in stride the normal stresses associated with running a store. But he was never the sort of person who would let a job give him ulcers.

“Anything I did was never a rat race. Everything that came up, I took care of. That’s business. I never let it get to me,” he said.

Wolfe said his only misgiving about coming out of retirement to champion the world’s loneliest musical instrument is that he didn’t do it sooner.

“If I had started this business 40 years ago or even 20 years ago, I think the entire face of the harmonica industry would have been changed,” he said. “Right now it is still possible that might occur, but it would take years, probably more than I have left.”