Nursing was the cloest thing I could get to my original desire.

Joseph Howard was a teacher for more than 30 years, and he has two fat notebooks of memorabilia to prove it. One contains the name, date and place of birth, school, class and grade of each of his 7,589 students. He retired early, not to take it easy but to return to school and start a second career. Howard and his wife, Anne, live in Studio City.

As a boy I had a dream of being a doctor someday, but unfortunately my father passed away when he was only 50 years old. I was 16 years old at the time. In those days, right in the midst of the Depression, we didn’t have all these scholarships and loans floating around, so I had to compromise and settle for something else. I majored in zoology with the hope that I would teach it in some university or maybe a museum curatorship.

I got married while I was in the Army, and afterwards we moved out to California. I was going from one job to another, marking time, more or less looking for the right niche. At that time there was a great shortage of elementary school teachers, so I took a job at an elementary school. I taught there for 12 years.

I couldn’t see myself staying an elementary school teacher for the rest of my life, so I decided high school teaching is where the opportunities are. I took additional courses in the summer and at night until I got the equivalent of a math major and took the math exam, and came out No.1. I retired from Fairfax High School nine years ago.

When I retired, I went immediately into nursing school at Los Angeles Valley College. That’s a two-year course of training and a rather rigorous one. I was frankly a little bit shocked when I got my first textbook, 1,600-odd pages of newspaper - sized print. I thought: “Oh my gosh, I’m not trying to be a doctor, I’m trying to be a nurse. Do you really have to know all of that?” It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. I was almost 62 when I graduated.

When I was still a nursing student, in supervised clinical practice, a patient turned on a call light, so I responded to see what she wanted. I walked into the room, and this woman was sitting in the bed, and she looked at me sort of nonplused. She didn’t say anything for a while. When she finally got her speech, she said: “Wow, this is some hospital. I called for a nurse and I got a doctor.” She saw a middle-aged man with a stethoscope sticking out of his pocket, and she drew her own conclusions. Happened many times, many times.

I didn’t really change careers. I merely shifted from nursing minds to nursing bodies. Patients don’t want to be in the hospital, they don’t want to be sick. With a few rare exceptions they want to get better, then get out of there and go back home. My patients are much more thankful, more grateful to me, than my students were.

Nursing was the closest thing I could get to my original desire to be a physician. I was much too old for that, but not too old to be a nurse. I’m happy with the choice I made, and I get a lot of joy, a lot of satisfaction out of it.

I have close contact with doctors, and I get to know them personally. They are human. They have their foibles, and they make mistakes too. One eye-opener was that the buck seems to stop at the nurse. If a doctor makes a mistake, the nurse is responsible for catching the error.

I worked full-time as a nurse until I turned 65. If I had continued working full-time after age 65, my salary would have wiped out the Social Security benefit totally. It just irked me to forfeit a benefit to which I was entitled. I still enjoy nursing part-time. I’ll just do less of it until I reach the magic age of 70 in October. Then I’ll be free to work as much as I like.

I’m convinced that keeping active in the sunset years of life is very effective in slowing down the aging process. I’m just not ready to sit back in a rocking chair and just watch the boob tube and drink beer and maybe go fishing now and then. As long as I’m strong and healthy and vigorous, I want to keep going at full speed.