Over-50

The Subject Was Sunglasses - Seton Hill U, Greensburg, PA, Class of 1967

Father, forgive me, at age 69, I should have known to steer clear of Seton Hill University Class of 1967 classmates such as Kathleen Huebner, et al. "

"But, my child, that has been the gift that keeps giving. Look at you now. All the markers scream success. Your blood pressure is that of a kid. Your communications boutique is thriving. Your unhinged rescue dog is calm. And, despite the PTS flashbacks from growing up on the mean streets of Jersey City, New Jersey, you like yourself."

Let's cut to the chase.

We are living longer. So, all that conventional wisdom about cherishing old friendships may be absolutely wrong. When I was age 69, that crazy adage got me in an emotional pickle.

That story, though, has a happy ending.

Three years ago this month I dumped Seton Hill University, Greensburg, Pennsylvania Class of '67 college acquaintance Kathleen Huebner.

I also had the dump truck stop in North Carolina to pick up Lee Harrison and Philly to load Irene Nunn.

It took about three months after that to connect the dots. But that I did. Today, at age 72, everything is going my way and that of my dog LOV (Lily of the Valley.)

Needless to say, there is no pull of nostalgia to attend the 50th College Reunion. The one in 2014 inflicted enough of a terrifying epiphany.

Back then, my business was flat. I was having a rough time accepting aging. Should that explain why a sensible professional woman should have reached back decades? No. But I did just that. Nonono. Shame on me.

Were Huebner et al. Alpha or It Girls in high school? They seemed to understand, just like It Girls, how to throw others into the vortex of confusion. Or maybe I was just especially vulnerable at the time.

On the surface, their interaction on Facebook, email and the iPhone seemed like good intentions. However, I have concluded that I experienced all that help as an ambush. And, isn't that all that matters? My perception? After all, I am in the business of perception.

In Tucson, Arizona, for example, where Huebner and I were residing at the time, she was a busy bee with advice. Unrequested.

The tipping point was this: On the public forum of Facebook, Huebner posted where I could purchase low-cost sunglasses.

Why low-cost?

Why not designer?

And, why sunglasses?

At that time in my life, I had more urgent priorities. Those ranged from rebuilding my communications boutique to socializing a troubled rescue dog.

Every May, until I pass over to that Great Microsoft Office Software in the sky, I will celebrate this anniversary.

It took that ordeal to get me straight about the perils of reunions with people we probably never really knew and whom we shouldn't let into our little lives in the present. Instead, we should be open the world, always moving forward. Isn't reaching back a signal that we have become closed systems?

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KATHLEEN HUEBNER

Those Alpha Girls in High School - How Quickly Their Star Went Dark

The research, reports New York Magazine, shows that the star of the high school Alpha Girls usually dims in adulthood.

Essentially, the Alpha Girls were those who derived high status from their popularity. Unlike in grade school, this group of populars was not necessarily well-liked.

But they had the innate traits or acquired what was necessary to make others want to belong to their crowd. Part of that know-how was participating in minor acts of rebellion. Those range from skipping class to petty theft. How cool that seemed back then.

Post high school, however, they weren't the ones who landed the plum jobs in media or dominated a congressional office inside the beltway. Also, the research shows that they tended to be unlucky in romantic relationships and developed substance abuse problems.

My hunch has always been that they peaked too early. High school was the top for them.

Those of us in business understand how dangerous early success can be. Usually, it's followed by failure. The challenge is for those who fall from grace, such as Steve Jobs, to put together a second, third and fourth act.

That's difficult for most of us. But it could be impossible for those who never had to develop complex strategies and new skills to get what they needed or wanted.

We who peaked later, usually much later, had to invest our energy in figuring out how to get even our rudimentary needs met. That experience served us well in navigating the ups and downs of life after high school.

Maybe it was because I wasn't an Alpha Girl that I could pull off two comeback since my industry collapsed at the turn of the century. Back in the mid 1970s, I had to engineer another kind of comeback when the market for humanities college professors crashed. Non-academic employers derided my academic background. But eventually I did land on my feet as a ghostwriter/speechwriter at Chevron.

The Alpha Girl of my day became pregnant during senior year in a Catholic all-girls high school. Horrors. Somehow, though she was allowed to graduate. But she was unable to use that one milestone as a platform for building a life post-spotlight.

The man who was forced to marry her didn't seem to treat her well. But, perhaps unfortunately for her, they stayed together and had two more children. No surprise, she died in her early 50s.

Reflection: That particular Alpha Girl could have made it her business to pick up a college degree and start a small business. But she didn't. Her memory haunts me. I was among the non-alphas who served her. Despite being used and abused by her, I remain feeling guilty about not being able to help her help her ordinary self post-high school.

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Donald Trump, Baby Boomer President, Makes Progress on Learning Curve

The Drudge Report prepares America for this Easter holiday weekend with the news that Donald Trump has a 48% approval rating.

That's according to the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll. And that means that 52% don't approve of the new president.  Here is the media coverage Drudge links to.

Therefore, Trump still has to make progress on the learning curve.

As watchers have observed, though, Trump is a guy who can learn. When he was elected and during the first early stumbles, it was assumed he was a closed system and the next 4 years would be a disaster.

But, then everything started changing.

He distanced himself from the alt-right ideology of Steve Bannon. The move to the more centrist views of his son-in-law Jared Kushner was experienced as smart - at least politically.

He responded to the human rights situation in Syria.

He modified his campaign perception of NATO.

It also helps that Trump had a major victory, after the defeat of Trumpcare, in Neil Gorsuch's confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, Trump is still shooting himself in the foot.

For example, he referred to Bill O'Reilly as one of the good guys. Yet, the tide of public opinion seems to be turning against that Fox News outsized mouth. After the law firm Paul, Weiss completes its investigation of the sex harassment allegations against O'Reilly, Murdoch Father & Sons might force his resignation.

Civic organizations throughout America might sponsor an essay contest on how the president of a nation can grow into the role. Trump may have the makings of a great president.

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Baby Boomers - "Home" Is In The Head (mostly)

Dorothy clicked her ruby teds, chanting, "There's no place like home." We all have that ideal concept of "home."

Only, it's possible that after hanging out in Oz, with all those wonderfully wounded characters like The Lion, Dorothy couldn't feel at home in plain-vanilla Kansas.

Sure, she still had that mindset of "home." And, post-Oz, she might have gone in search of what could become home. Isn't that most of our stories?

Home, for me, had been in my childhood and in my mental constructs New Jersey. More specifically, Jersey City and the Jersey Shore. No matter where else I have gotten a driver's license I never forgot where home was. It had been 15 years since I had been back to check it out.

Since I am back on the east coast, late this week, I made it a must to drive the six hours to the two parts of NJ where I had formed such deep memories.

Certainly my dog, which isn't named "Toto," and I experienced what was immediately familiar - and comforting. There was the jammed Garden State Parkway during rush hour. So many talked just like me - in a heavy NJ accent, with all its intrusive "r" sounds. And, the verbal interaction was very direct.

However, I shouldn't have been surprised that much else wasn't familiar.

In the 1950s, we all seemed to live in tenements. And all the neighborhoods were safe. This week I got it that the safe neighborhoods were the gentrified ones. And those I couldn't afford. The old-line machine city has morphed into The Wall Street and Media Across the Hudson. Don Draper from "Mad Men" would fit right in.

The Jersey Shore was no longer where poor families could hang out. It had become a mix of lux condos and tourist traps. You know the latter is in play when too many storefronts have a neon sign flashing "Psychic."

In my own versions of Oz, I had figured out who I was. Essentially, it was back to the simple, direct person I have been until age 18. Then, I had ventured out. Bit by bit I lost myself. Over the past three years, it was through radical choices of relocating first to Arizona, then eastern Ohio, that I put back together the brash Jersey Girl I had been.

That entity felt very content to come home to low-cost, small-town Ohio today. Arizona had been the halfway house. This is home. Both in reality and in the fantasy.

Before I actually got back to my house, I swung by Firestone. The car's computer dashboard had signaled a problem. The guys there seemed a composite of the best of how I remember NJ and how I am positioning and packaging OH in my mind.

That's what we humans do: Code the program for "home" in our brains. If we are successful at that, we are reasonably happy.

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Baby Boomers - Maybe We Have to Ditch Middle/Upper Class Protective Coloring

Ranking #317 on Amazon is "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg. 

Well-researched and with a sophisticated tone, the book documents how class-obsessed America has been, right from the get-go.  And, the founding fathers were the biggest snobs. They could be. After all, they were members of the elite. And since then, those labeled as "lower class" - or, horrors, "white trash" - have been as much victims of prejudice as have been African-Americans

Lawyers, of course, always knew that. 

It's standard procedure to make over the lower-class defendant to simulate the appearance and behavior of the middle class. That has been almost cartoonish. When I was being screened for jury duty in a murder trial in Tucson, Arizona, until everyone was identified, there was no way of telling who was the defendant, who was the defense lawyer and who was the prosecutor.

Back in the late 1940s, there emerged an exit ramp out of "white trash." Baby Boomers were the first generation with access to higher education en masse. 

But to participate in that new rite of passage we were coached in the language and ways of the middle and even upper class. That all came our in our personal essays to college. The tone had to be sophisticated. The content aspirational. We were focused on middle class professional roles.  It was bye-bye to our roots.

Entrepreneurship wasn't hot. So, the newly minted college graduates had to go off to further education or Corporate America. It would have been career suicide not to take on the protective coloring of the ruling class. That is, the professional and corporate elite. They were the lawyers, doctors, engineers and executives/managers.

That was then.

As career paths blow up, what had been imprinted about making it economically in America frequently is proving to be actual obstacles to survival. The lawyer or corporate manager who loses a job may have never known how to scramble economically the way "white trash" had. And still does.  A classic example: It may never dawn on those  displaced professional  to bunk in a rented trailer until they can fix their worsening financial situation.

Author Isenberg brings out that the medium of television in its early days presented the middle class lifestyle of "Ozzie and Harriet" as the template for Americana. The lower class characters of "The Honeymooners" provided comic relief. The message was: Let us laugh at the bus driver and sewer worker.

With economic status in play throughout America, there could be emerging respect for the creativity and cunning of "white trash." But, likely the legal system will forever superimpose classism on how participants present themselves in courtrooms, to probation officers and for jobs in law enforcement.

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Baby Boomer 1st-Time Entrepreneurs - Be in Right Place

Certain places, at least at certain points in their history, tend to be hotbeds of genius. That's what Eric Weiner documents in his breakthrough book "Geography of Genius." Here you can order it from Amazon.

Let's cut to the chase and define "genius" in a very limited way. And that definition is essentially that genius opens the cognitive, emotional, and spiritual doors to novel kinds of problem-solving.

Many immigrants to the U.S. were geniuses in how they figured out how to build wealth from nothing.

My uncle leveraged his stint in an American prison to do that. No snitch, he made friends and influenced people. Soon enough he had created a chain of newspaper stands in Jersey City, New Jersey.

As the labor market is shutting out more over-65 because of age bias, former traditional kinds of employees are toying with the idea of becoming 1st-time entrepreneurs. The prerequisite for that is to be in the right environment.

Jersey City was a hotbed of street smarts and financial desperation. That was then. Currently it might be too gentrified to be the platform on which genius can take off.

What 1st time entrepreneurs have to search for is a setting that is not comfortable. That rules out most retirement communities.

In Oro Valley, Arizona, I visited former classmate Kathleen Huebner. She had purchased a house in a retirement community.

At the time I was struggling to reset my own enterprise. "Nothing will happen here," I thought to myself. And stayed away from Huebner's little world. Eventually, I got it that I had to pull up the shallow roots I had laid down in AZ if I was determined to have my new initiatives blossom. And that I did.

Where can entrepreneurs find and unleash their genius? That's simple. It's where people are struggling. That could be for or against something or someone. The genius of the Founding Fathers in putting together the Constitution came from their struggle against British tyranny. They were focused on not allowing that in this new nation.

Here in Western Ohio, when I currently am based, the struggle is to not permit the decline of the steel industry to rob them of dignity.

The Greenwood Chevrolet dealership in Austintown, OH, does backflips to create the best in every category of business transactions. Recently "ChevyDave" (David Bradfield) won the award for the most sales. No surprise, it was ChevyDave who helped me find the way to my apartment complex when I blew into town at the end of August and was lost.

You bet, everyone in this area of OH is open to opening new doors for business.

If you are rooted to an area that doesn't have such fire in the belly can you start one?

Yes.

Silicon Valley wasn't always what it is currently. Baby Boomer friends of mine working in that region years ago remember a sleepy tech-oriented place. Then they started hearing about a guy name "Steve" ...

 

 

Hazel Sanchez - Started Teaching Career At Age 80, Still Working At Age 102

CBS is featuring Hazel Sanchez.

Since she's still working at age 102, she's atypical enough to be a news item. But, within a few years, her kind of approach to aging could become more standard. There is growing pushback on society's expectation that reaching a certain age requires ceasing to be in the marketplace hustling for opportunity.

Most of Sanchez' life had been spent as a traditional stay-at-home mom. Then at 80, reports CBS, she started her career at Sundance School in North Plainfield, New Jersey. Looks like she was a Late Bloomer. She's still there teaching.

This will become more common as the aging split into two cultures. There will be those of us who refuse to stop working. Then there will be those who decide to retire or are forced into a non-work lifestyle.

As I hammer in this article in Medium, there is growing tension between the two cultures. Those nestled in retirement communities such as Saddlebrook, Oro Valley, Arizona, often question why we are out there trying to earn a buck. Perhaps they miss having us available to come out to play with them.

When a resident, Kathleen Huebner, invited to Saddlebrooke to have a holiday dinner in one of its dining rooms, I felt like I didn't belong. The ethos was families enjoying the multi-generational pull force of grandchildren. And there I was, in my late 60s, a career gal. I wanted to talk business, just as I had when I was excited to finally land my first full-time job in Corporate America. Currently, I am just as excited to land plum writing assignments in high-traffic digital publications.

The Debt Game Our Mothers Never Taught Us

From the get-go, our mothers warned us Baby Boomers against debt. That's the financial wisdom they assumed would give us the edge.

After all, our mothers went from the fun of the Gilded Age to the drudgery of The Great Depression. It wasn't until I was a ghostwriter/speechwriter at Chrysler that I learned that borrowing big money was how the big boys did it. Lee Iacocca saved the auto company by talking the U.S. government into providing loan guarantees. Because that worked, we all made a bundle.

Before that, I would only borrow small amounts. When I was 11, I talked my uncle into lending me what it took for me to buy into a franchise. I knew enough not to approach Mom. My little enterprise did well.

However, had I been socialized to think big when it came to borrowing I would have not worked every summer to put myself through college and not take loans. I would have taken advantage of low-cost loans to study abroad. That would have enhanced my resume, network, and confidence. Likely I could have landed a job in Europe. Instead I took the road more traveled and went to graduate school for a degree which turned out to be unmarketable. Duh.

Since Chrysler, I play the debt game regularly. That's exactly how I rebranded my own business into a service that's been in demand. And, that's why I published an article in MyBankTracker on why debt is good. Here you can read it. Pass copies on to other Baby Boomers whose mothers hammered the supposed perils of debt.

 

Survival! - If Baby Boomers Make It to Christmas 2015, That's Universe's Gift To Us

Maybe the game, at least in these dangerous times, is simply about staying alive. Forget anything but survival. And let's be grateful, if we make it until Christmas 2015, that the universe has given us the gift of staying power.

Last night I attended a meeting at a spiritual fellowship. Some members were kvetching about not being happy. Being in debt. Not achieving as much professionally as they might have had they not done this or had done that.

I smirked. It seemed so 20th-century to be consumed with grandiose expectations. Especially for the Baby Boomers at that spiritual center.

For example, we survived ourselves. We were the first generation to embrace sex, drugs and rock and roll. Because of growing affluence we took huge risks with how we made a living. We felt smug about our nest eggs but hadn't planned right. All or much of that vaporized in the two financial crashes of the 21st century. And, the Coca-Puffs kids, we ate much too much sugar.

Yet, here we are. I made it out of the too-expensive New York Metro area to the much more affordable Southwest. I managed to grow out of being the Coca-Puff kid. My communications boutique is thriving. My aggressive rescue dog has mellowed into a lap-curler. In addition, I am among those who didn't off themselves because of severe clinical depression.

In short, the universe has been generous to me. I know it. I choose to be glad, not sad, this Christmas.

Donald Trump Taught So Many Of Us Power Of Fearlessness

Donald Trump's political future is irrelevant to so many of us Baby Boomers who have already learned so much from his campaign. That's been a game-changer for us. And that's all that matters.

Trump's signature trait has been fearlessness. The media, including Fox head Roger Ailes, could huff and puff. But they couldn't blow his bravado down.

In the debates, in framing issues, and in speeches, he didn't take crap. He might have been right. He might have been wrong. But he didn't default over and over again into apology. Maybe his whole rhetorical style has killed off the "I'm sorry." And this is a guy who had his brush with financial disaster more than once.

That is the antithesis of what we Baby Boomers had been socialized to be. We were the generation who labored in Corporate America. There the persona was conformity and compliance.

Before that, the high school guidance whatever told us that we would never get into college if we didn't "have a good record."

A recession or two without work drained any piss and vinegar we had left over from our counterculture days.

So, there we Baby Boomers were: conditioned to be afraid. Then Trump shows us that's all wrong.

I agreed with him.

I stopped being scared in my business dealings. More came in. They all put down the deposit I requested. They treated me well during the assignment.

I stopped being scared in my personal dealings. Like a Millennial I blocked calls from those I no longer wanted in my life. My body language is no longer tentative. I walk into a room like I own it.

I stopped being scared about money. If Trump can ride out whatever, so can I.

I now wonder how different our careers and lives might have been had we been socialized to not take crap. Ever.