It dawned on me, ‘I now have more money than I’ve got time left.’

Morris Cutler, 63, had a career as a primary education teacher and administrator. Then an overseas break from his local duties changed his life. Cutler and his wife, Faye, live in Northridge.

When I was 50, I took a job overseas with the Agency for International Development, our State Department thing through Teacher’s College, Columbia, and I went to Afghanistan.

We got to Afghanistan three years prior to the Russians’ coming in. It was a very primitive society, wonderful people but highly primitive and tribal.

The Afghans’ work ethic was a little different than ours. Family came first in an Afghan’s life. If one of our workers in the Ministry of Education had to go shopping, he took off the morning and did whatever chore he had to do.

I used to be a Type A guy, and I was going to work until I dropped. When I got overseas, I learned there was a different way of living. The pace was so different. My wife and I talked about it, and suddenly it dawned on me, “I now have more money than I’ve got time left. Let’s retire and do whatever we want to do.”

When I quit in ‘82, I spent a lot of time with gardening, and I did a lot of reading. By the third year I started saying, “Hey, I need to get out amongst them more. I have to have some fresh ideas, some new input.” So I joined the Plato Society at UCLA. It was started up for people who are retired who want mental and cultural stimulation but don’t want to sit in classes with 19- to 20-year-old kids.

The very first semester, I’m driving that freeway to UCLA, going through the Sepulveda Pass, and I’m saying, “What the hell are you doing sitting here in this car in this traffic? You’re retired.”

I decided to start a group in the Valley. I got people from Plato and several friends in the Valley, and we organized a steering committee. I wrote a letter to President Cleary at CSUN and suggested we have a learning-in-retirement group. It took a little while, but we got it going.

SAGE, Study Activity Growth and Enrichment, started in ’87. At the first meeting we had 14 people. I was really disappointed. We selected one topic. It was going to be called “hot issues.” Each week we would take a current topic that was running big in the media and we would have discussions on it. In the meantime, every month we would send out flyers and have an open house.

I got a call from a woman named Charlotte with a very heavy German accent. She came to an open house meeting, a charming lady, very quiet, reserved. Part of our activity is to sit in the lounge and socialize. It turns out that Charlotte had lived in Berlin. Her husband came over after the war with the Wernher von Braun group that Truman brought in. He was a physicist.

She was giving this background, and I said, “Were you in Berlin during the war? During the bombing?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You know, the Americans were dropping the bombs. I was frightened to death.”

And I said, “Charlotte, that was me. I was a navigator with the 8th Air Force.” And I said, “But you were throwing up the kitchen stove!” And we laughed about it, about the change that has taken place in our society. I was a young 18-year-old kid then, second lieutenant, just a wet-nosed little guy.

In SAGE you get the diversity of backgrounds, and when you have a discussion you’re getting different viewpoints. The only problem is, we have too many liberals. So several of us play devil’s advocate.

We want people who are incorrigibly curious. They’ve got to read, they’ve got to like to talk about what they read and they’ve got to like to argue. You don’t have to have a degree. We don’t want to be intellectuals. The idea is, let’s develop study topics across a wide range.

We now have 26 signed up. We had three topics this summer, the right to die, the Middle Ages and classical Greek drama. Right to die was very emotional. People were talking about living wills, cremation. So you have a lot of emotion involved in that one. But this is the excitement.