There was one title, “So You Always Wanted to Teach.”
Morton Simons chose a career in the fabric business over the academic life, his first love. Retirement gave him the chance to pursue the teaching career he rejected more than 40 years ago. Simons and his wife, Selma, live in Encino.
I retired at the first available opportunity for collecting Social Security. I was 62. There were a multitude of things that I wanted to do, that I never had time to do.
When the war was over, I had decided to make my career in retailing and marketing and so switched majors at college from history to business administration.
I gave business a good shot. By and large I enjoyed what I was doing in business. Things like product development were interesting. Colors and pattern and design and the kind of thing that goes into decorative fabrics.
But outside the office my interests certainly were not fabrics. My interests lay in the areas that I was so interested in when I was younger, history and political science and philosophy. That’s where I did my reading. I always have done a tremendous amount of reading, all my life.
Business is a relatively narrow kind of thing to which to devote the totality of your life. If you don’t have interests other than your 9-to-5 activity, then you live with a pretty limited scope.
I retired on the first of February, 1979, and on the second of February I went down to register for classes at Valley College. I wanted to resume studying in areas that I had had to neglect. I’ve always regretted the fact that I did not realize my ambition to become a history teacher, and I’ve always been frustrated.
When I looked through the available courses, there was one title, “So You Always Wanted to Teach.” A remarkable coincidence. Yes, I had always wanted to teach.
After finishing this course on how to teach, you were allowed to teach in the adult education division. I started doing that the following semester, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
I now teach one 20th Century American history course and one course in current events, with an emphasis on how current events relate to prior events. Why and how things are happening only because something happened previously.
I spend one day a week there. I teach one class in the morning, one in the afternoon. It’s the high spot of my week.
After taking some courses there and starting this teaching thing, I decided to switch from Valley College to Cal State Northridge, a four-year university. I then spent six years there as a full-time undergraduate. I took classes in history, political science, philosophy, classes in God knows what, just about everything there was. Statistics. Logic. I was kind of a dilettante, nothing really structured, just whatever happened to look good in the catalogue in any given semester.
I very studiously avoided taking those subjects that were required for graduation, so they couldn’t come to me and say, “You have too many credits, you must get out.”
I took all the midterms and the finals and got grades in everything. I never audited a course. I got lots of As, and a sprinkling of Bs. I was a major in humanities in my senior year, with 199 1/2 credits. The grade-point average was above 3.5.
My life began when I retired. I’m serious. When some people leave work, they are left without interests. They haven’t developed any other interests or enthusiasms other than their work. And so they die or they wither or they fritter their time away. And it’s such valuable time. It’s the very little that you have left. There’s so much less to come than there was before. I’m always very aware of that. Some people aren’t. So I have to crowd as much into the time I have left as I possibly can.
I can’t think of anything that you might do after retirement that is more calculated to keep you alive than keeping your brain active. Otherwise it turns to rice pudding and there’s just nothing there.
