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Others, like Joe Weaver, will leave less tangible legacies. Weaver, a wiry Tai Chi enthusiast who moved into a Dallas retirement home last fall, was dismayed to find that its Tai Chi classes consisted of residents sitting and waving their arms around. Though he just turned 90, he leads several Tai Chi and water-aerobics classes at the home. "At this stage in my life, I'm blessed with good health and have some ability in the world of exercise, and if I share or transfer that to other people, it's going to do good for me directly, and it's going to help those people," he says. "As a result, I'm going to gain satisfaction that I wasn't even seeking."
But getting too emotionally connected to your pastime can also drive you a little nuts, as soft-spoken nurse Stella Henry, 56, can tell you. She's on a quest to round out her 500-strong Beanie Baby collection. Among her tactics: spending evenings frantically refreshing eBay pages; lining up a source at Nordstrom's who hides new models for her; driving from her Los Angeles home to San Diego and Santa Barbara, Calif., to follow up on rumors of Beanie supply; attending Beanie conventions; and frequenting a tiny Barstow, Calif., shop where she finds rare Beanies. "It's a supplier. It's like drugs!" she laughs. With display cases in her living room, a Beanie MasterCard, magazine subscriptions, T shirts, mugs and pens, and clothes for the toys, Henry knows she's somewhat infatuated. "It ends up this crazy competitive thing," she says.
Dick Rennick, 60, and most others find, though, that a major benefit of such hobbies is stress relief. As a high schooler he cruised his town's hamburger stand in a roaring '53 Ford, juiced up with parts from the local junkyard. As a young man, with no money for a garage, he would jack up cars in his yard and tinker with them. Then, as his plumbing company grew successful, he found that cars offered an escape from work stress. "When you come home at 11 p.m., and you're wound up, you go in the garage, get your wrenches, start working on stuff. Your hands get a little bloody, a little dirty, and you're ready for bed at 1 a.m.," he says, perhaps explaining why, in Rennick's custom-built Yucca Valley, Calif., home, the garage is bigger than the house. (Hey, something has to house the 1948 Minnesota fire truck he just bought.)
Rennick's day job and hobby are closely related; it's not uncommon for hobbyists to choose pastimes similar to their work. Some even use hobbies as an excuse to put off retirement, like New Yorker Arnold Greenberg, 68. Eighteen years ago, the onetime lawyer bought a popular travel bookstore on New York City's Madison Avenue. Now he works five days a week, covering his acquisitions in clear Mylar covers and talking with buyers about Baedeker's guides. He has no thoughts of stopping. "I just signed a new lease. Let's just hope I live that long!" he says with a chuckle. As you grow older, he says, "the big mistake you make is to stop doing what you like doing."