The Endless Autumn : With More Senior Citizens Now Living Longer and Healthier, Retirement Has Become a Whole New Way of Life

In the development where she lives, she could have played pool or tennis, gone swimming or dancing, ridden horses or taken up golf on a 27-hole course. She could have grown her own vegetables or flowers, attended the theater or taken classes in everything from jewelry-making to woodworking. Or she simply could have contemplated the sunset on the banks of a creek, tossing bread to ducks.

But, no, Irene Puhlmann had other plans.

“I go for a stroll with my cat, which I have trained to walk on a leash,” she said. “It wasn’t easy--a stubborn German against a stubborn cat. But I won, and now we both enjoy it.”

Her training of and her daily trot with her tabby, Puhlmann noted, helps to fill her retirement time, which like thousands of fortunate senior citizens nationwide, she has plenty of.

In fact, because of medical advances, greater public health consciousness and increased life expectancies, a rising number of older Americans like Puhlmann, a resident of Leisure World in Laguna Hills, are becoming part of a quiet trend.

They are “spending larger fractions of their lives in retirement,” said Dr. Richard Suzman, health science administrator with the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md. “And often this means more of (seniors’) lives are spent in retirement communities.”

More Than Just Play

Dr. Jon Pynoos, gerontology professor at the Andrus Gerontology Center at USC, observed: “What we are seeing is the aging of some retirement communities.”

For seniors like Puhlmann, who has spent 22 of her 77 years in Leisure World, the prolonged retirement has been mostly pleasurable. It has been a binge of relaxation, a period in which she and many seniors feel unpressured to make extended or extensive plans. They travel and spend time with their families. And their biggest concern often is simply their next leisure.

But for American society as a whole, and especially for segments of the housing and health-care industries, modern seniors’ long-lasting retirement has focused attention on more than just play.

It promises to increase the prominence of three kinds of communities for the aged: Adult-only villages of condominiums or co-op apartments, usually owned and occupied by active, independent, empty-nesters 55 and older; assisted-living units, usually rented, and generally including meal, maid and other services; and life-care centers, where for big initial fees and monthly service charges, the elderly get lodging, meals, utilities, amenities, and, most importantly, access to hospital care, if required, and a nursing home at no extra cost.

“The adult community, which includes the 45,000-member Sun City in Arizona, came into being in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s,” said Winston Elton, principal with the real estate consulting firm of Peat, Marwick/Goodkin in San Diego. “The life-care community is really a type of nursing home, and those go back decades. The third alternative, also known as congregate living, is the newest. It pretty much started within the last 10 years, and has really gained ground in the last five.

“Such living,” he said, “is kind of a hybrid between being totally independent and being somewhat dependent. The rush is on because everyone is gearing up for the gray power of the baby boomers around the year 2000.”

Which of these situations--besides, of course, the prospect of simply staying in their present single-family homes--will best suit the current group of elderly and the baby boomers and even those that will follow them?

Answers to such questions will evolve in the years ahead but some clues to the future already may be apparent in models of retirement life that exist now.

Tracy Strevey, the 87-year-old former dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at USC, tried to explain why he and his wife have been so satisfied at the 2,095-acre Leisure World, a prime Southern California example of the active seniors’ retirement community.

“You see people out walking at midnight,” Strevey said, gesturing toward one of the complex’s many tree-lined streets.

“And when we go on a trip, all we do is lock the door, notify the security desk, and leave,” added his wife, Margaret, 80.

Highly Desireable Address

The Streveys have traveled often but always have returned to Leisure World, the 21,000-resident community that will observe its silver anniversary this year. The Streveys have lived there almost since it opened.

They sold their West Los Angeles home and were heading for 18 months to Ethiopia, where the Ford Foundation asked him to become executive vice

president of Haile Selassie University. She refused to go abroad without having an American home to return to. “When we purchased our place (in Leisure World) in 1966, it was just a parcel of land with a stake in it,” Strevey said.

But now it has become a highly desireable address, one that many seniors are competing for. “There are only about 200 units (in the complex) on the market right now, most of them one-bedroom,” said Timothy B. Taylor, community information manager. “Prospective buyers bid against each other for the larger ones.”

Why the popularity for a place, which some disparage because of its concentrated population of the old?

“We don’t have facilities for people who can’t take care of themselves,” Margaret Strevey said. “We emphasize that this is an active life, if you want it--and most people here do want it.”

Through Leisure World, residents enjoy a formidable array of activities, including hobby and academic classes, sports and recreations, as well as other individual and group diversions. They can participate in clubs for those interested in boccie, parapsychology, Scrabble and the needs of the hearing impaired, to name a few. The complex itself contains extensive, well-maintained landscaped grounds.

Although a few rentals are available, more than 92% of the complex’s $40,000 to $500,000 and 800- to 2,250-square-foot co-ops and condominiums--most of which are paid for in full, in cash--are occupied by owners, who also must cover a monthly maintenance fee of $250 to $350 to live in Leisure World.

The complex feels safe and comfortable to residents like Puhlmann, the cat lady who noted that Leisure World is so quiet at night that “the only noise I hear (is) the owls, which is delightful.”

Puhlmann noted that last year she slipped on wet leaves and suffered a back injury that temporarily kept her indoors.

“When my neighbors discovered that I wouldn’t be outside for a while, they put a sign-up sheet on my door,” said Puhlmann, who came with her mother to Southern California from Minnesota. “They took turns walking my cat every day. Where else would that sort of thing happen?”

Madelyne and Al Hanson, who both are 75 and have lived in Leisure World for 17 years, praised life in a retirement community. Al Hanson, a retired contractor, explained why he chose Leisure World over his last home: “I would have done almost anything to get out of Beverly Hills. The traffic and parking problems were getting to me. Quietness is so important to me that when we travel, I always request a quiet room. And life in Beverly Hills was getting noisy. Besides, when we decided to move, I was still working full time, and I wanted a secure home for my wife.”

Though there are occasional conflicts between neighbors at Leisure World, “Probably only 1% of the residents sit here and complain, but they would complain anyway, anywhere,” Margaret Strevey said. “When you become older, you don’t change; you get more so.”

Leisure World requires that at least one person in a unit must be 55 or older, though the average age in the complex is 76 years old, said Kirk Watilo, vice president of community services.

Margaret Strevey noted that residents do not find the age rules restrictive, particularly because “at any given time, you see an awful lot of grandchildren around this place,” and “in any calendar year, a visitor can stay for up to 60 days.”

Though the National Center for Health Statistics estimates that 7% of seniors live in retirement communities, Margaret Strevey and her husband had not anticipated that they would stay so long in Leisure World: “We were married 58 years ago. We have wound up living here longer than in any other place during that time.”

But the hours of leisure at Leisure World have generally been pleasant, not painful or boring. “Anyone who thinks this is like living in a prison is greatly mistaken,” Hanson said. “We aren’t at all locked in. As a matter of fact, on the basis of sewer flow, between 20% and 25% of the residents are gone from their places on any one day.”

Sure, Puhlmann noted, because of the ages of her neighbors, death is more pervasive in Leisure World than would be the case in an ordinary neighborhood.

But it “doesn’t bother me,” she emphasized. “People close out their lives in a beautiful way. In my building is a woman who is 97. And she still does her own cooking. She is living a full life. Dying is part of the game.”

Americans are both living longer and retiring earlier, says Cynthia M. Taeuber, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau. She noted that “death before the mid-60s now is relatively rare within the general population.”

Suzman of the national aging institute noted that since the ‘50s, the number of men 65 and older still in the labor force has declined sharply, plummeting from 46% in 1950 to 33% by 1960 and just 16% by 1986.

A similar trend of their dropping out of the work force is detectable among men in their 50s, Suzman said, adding, “I think one reason is private pensions, plus the fact that, research has found, many people don’t like their jobs anyway.”

But once they enter their long retirement, and after they slow sufficiently so that active retirement communities like Leisure World no longer are appropriate for them, the elderly have other options.

They can, for example, choose to go into what is known as assisted-, catered- or congregate-living, which some developers say is the fastest growing type of senior housing nationally.

Recognizing that America is aging and that seniors are growing more affluent, the Marriott Corp., for example, began five years ago exploring how it might work with the elderly, employing its lodging and hospitality expertise. Its main thrust seems to be what it calls catered living communities for older adults. “By the end of this year, Marriott expects to have six such communities under construction, and another 19 sites under contract,” said Richard L. Sneed, a company spokesman.

Catered living, he explained, translates into a life style for seniors with rent ranging from $1,000 to $1,600 a month, in exchange for which they get three levels of service: apartment living for residents who still can be largely independent but need help with chores such as dressing, bathing or taking medication; apartment living for residents who need even more “hands-on” assistance; and a licensed nursing facility, on-site, for seniors needing 24-hour nursing care.

In West Los Angeles, Samuel Wacht is an architect who specializes in designing congregate housing. He laments the decision by his 80-year-old widowed mother to remain alone in a conventional apartment. He fears for her safety, and worries that she may face emergencies she cannot cope with.

Though she has been mugged twice in the complex where she lives alone, she refuses to move into any housing complex for seniors. She likes her independence. She drives herself to the supermarket and to a community center, where she is a volunteer.

“Sharing a communal living space, however, need not mean losing your independence,” her son said. “On the contrary, by relieving an elderly person of the worry of ‘what if’--what if I have an accident alone in my home, or what if I find a burglar in my bedroom?--congregate living can actually increase one’s freedom on action.”

For 25 of her 85 years, Volena Davidson has lived at Mt. San Antonio Gardens, one of the nation’s longer-lived life-care communities. Though other such projects have suffered painful financial failures, Mt. San Antonio Gardens in Pomona has thrived for 27 years.

“I think we could live on the outside,” Davidson said. “But I would hate to leave here. I no longer like to cook or wash the dishes or do anything like that.

“I didn’t expect to be in this nice place this long because I didn’t expect to live this long,” she mused. “But here I am.

“It’s a little devastating to realize that so many who moved in at the same time as I did have died. But this would have happened even if we had all been on the outside and they had lived down the block. This is the way life is.”

Davidson said that her first husband died six years after they entered the retirement community; she has remarried and now lives with her second husband, Sidney.

“This is far better than being a burden on your family, to be as independent as you can,” she said. “We just write a check at the end of the month, and everything is taken care of for us.”

She and her husband are among 450 seniors, 62 or older, who must be healthy upon arrival. They live in everything from apartments to cottages on 27 acres.

The uncertainty that troubles the retirement of many Americans has been all but eliminated, because the facility cares for just about all their basic needs until death.

This coverage is not cheap.

Marketing director Ruth Davis noted the cost for the smallest accommodation is a one-time “founder’s fee” of $39,000, after which a monthly service fee of $1,070 is paid.

This fee, Davis said, includes the cost of three meals daily; utilities, except telephone; biweekly housecleaning; weekly linen changes; recreational programs and entertainment, and complete nursing, medical and surgical care.

As residents’ health dictate, they may move to different levels of care in the facility--from temporary help in their own residences, to personal assistance with such chores as dressing, bathing and making the bed in lodges; to full care in a 55-bed nursing facility. The contract also covers hospital costs.

“At today’s prices, what we offer is a good deal,” Davis said. “We have a vacancy factor of only 2%.”

Mary Grace Kovar, senior statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics, commented: “Retirement community living is very much an upper-middle-class phenomenon. These things aren’t cheap.”

For some seniors, there also are available specialized retirement communities, such as Pilgrim Place in Claremont. Its 325 residents have something in common: They all were, or are, employed for at least 20 years in salaried professional Christian work (retirement housing originated mostly with religious groups).

“The center started in 1915,” spokeswoman Martha Frimand said. “As of now, we have more than 600 applicants, which would take us through the year 2010 for their entering.”

Residents, she explained, must enter between ages 65 and 75 and must be in good physical and emotional health. After paying an initial fee amounting to 9% of their net assets, residents pay a monthly rent of $260-$950, depending on the accommodations, mostly cottages on the 33 acres.

“Although most residents live independently,” Frimand said, “there is a lodge which provides assisted living, and a 59-bed Health Services Center for long-term nursing care.”

Though the average 55-year-old, Kovar noted, can expect to live another 24.3 years, at Pilgrim Place, like in so many other retirement communities, there are residents who never thought they would spend so much of their life in one spot.

Sara Zwemer has been at Pilgrim Place for 28 of her 93 years.

“My husband and I were missionaries in India for the Reformed Church in America from 1923 to 1960,” she said. “He died over there. When I reached age 65, I moved into here, but I had no idea it would be for nearly a third of my life. I have lived here more consecutive years than in any other place.”