Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

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Aside from health, money is the most pervasive worry of the aged; income maintenance is a major need. Private pension plans need attention too. According to one informed estimate, only 10% of the people who work under pension plans actually receive any benefits, usually because they do not stay long enough to qualify. As presently arranged, pensions also tend to lock older workers into their jobs and, if they become unemployed, to lock them out. They are then denied jobs because it is too expensive to let them join a pension plan.

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Tennyson

Will able 70-year-olds have more opportunities to work in the future? Probably not. Instead of raising the age of mandatory retirement, business and labor may lower it, perhaps to 50 or below making workers eligible even earlier for social insecurity. Aside from those fortunate few in the professions law, medicine, dentistry, architecture most of the people over 65 who are still at work today are farmers, craftsmen and self-employed tradesmen, all categories whose numbers are shrinking. Of course, people cannot work hard forever. Each man ages according to his own clock, but at long last he is likely to lose much of his strength, his drive and adaptability. Witness the gerontocracy that slows down Congress and the businesses that have failed because of rigid leadership. But there are still many areas where the aged can serve and should, for aside from humane consideration, they can provide skill and wisdom that otherwise would be wasted.

New plans to recruit, train and deploy older workers to provide much needed help in hospitals, special schools and elsewhere will be discussed at the White House Conference on Aging scheduled for November 1971. Meanwhile, a few small-scale programs point the way. One is Operation Green Thumb, which hires retired farmers for landscaping and gardening. Another is the International Executive Service Corps, which arranges for retired executives to lend their management skills to developing countries. Hastings College of Law in San Francisco is staffed by law professors who have retired from other schools. A federally financed program called Foster Grandparents pays 4,000 low-income "grandparents" to care for 8,000 underprivileged youngsters. Although they have numbered only in the hundreds, most elderly volunteers in Vista and the Peace Corps have been great assets. "We know about outhouses and can remember when there weren't any refrigerators," says Nora Hodges, 71, who spent two years in Tunisia and is now associate Peace Corps director in the Ivory Coast. "People in underdeveloped countries rate age very highly. When we meet with this appreciative attitude, we outdo ourselves."

Begin the preparation for your death And from the fortieth winter by that

thought

Test every work of intellect or faith.

W.B. Yeats