THE SPECIAL YEARS : 50 AND BEYOND: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE : New Beginings : <i> The age of retirement can be an age of creativity and growth</i>

There’s a myth about retirement, and it goes something like this: You work all your life, you build up a nest egg, you reach age 65--and you while away the rest of your days watching the sun set.

Only, it usually doesn’t happen that way. And that’s a good thing. The age of retirement can be an age of creativity and growth, much to the benefit of retirees.

Increasingly, Americans are taking advantage of their later years to pursue new careers, perform community service and launch business ventures.

Following are the tales of five Southern Californians who have plotted their own, unique courses in work and retirement.

Whether toiling for the financial reward or volunteering for the psychic reward, their examples suggest that staying involved can be the key to staying alive. Here are their stories:

Earl Gains is sitting inside his small apartment, wearing a blue T-shirt that sports the popular refrain “Don’t Worry. Be Happy.”

It fits him well: For the tanned and youthful 75-year-old, the path to post-retirement happiness led to an elementary school in Atwater. Twice a week, he sits down in the library to help children with reading disabilities.

And occasionally, he charms larger groups of students with tales of his travels throughout the world. Ask Gains why he volunteers, and his answer is decisive: “I get more than I give.”

In 1976, when he was about to retire from his job as an accountant with Columbia Pictures, Gains had two goals. He wanted to see the world and to help others closer to home.

He’s done both. His apartment near Griffith Park is brimming with trophies from around the globe: a camel’s-hair fly swatter from Egypt (which looks like a stringy wig on a stick), a square bamboo cane from Japan, an Australian boomerang, and his own photograph of elephants in Kenya.

An entire wall is decorated with exotic masks from other countries.

The souvenirs are also teaching aids. He sometimes brings them to the Atwater school, where he participates in a community program for older volunteers known as DOVES.

“I treat the kids like friends, and they need that,” says Gains, who has just returned from a month in Florida and the Caribbean. “They don’t feel like there’s another teacher on their back.”

Even before retiring, Gains used to volunteer, leading groups of the blind on expeditions to swimming pools, shops, even the theater.

His efforts for the children, he says, keep him young: “If I hung around 75-year-old guys, what would I hear? I’d hear a lot of negativity. I’d hear about arthritis. I’d hear about guys who lost their wives. With kids it’s different.”

If his travel schedule--which includes a lengthy overseas trip every year--makes Gains sound wealthy, that’s hardly the case. Gains, a bachelor from Upstate New York, gets by on a pension and Social Security. Local travel takes place in his 12-year-old Dodge Colt.

But in retirement, he explains: “You don’t dress up every day. You don’t go out to lunch every day. You want your health and your peace of mind--and you want to put something back in society.”

The career of Ernest Levens might seem, at first, to have taken a series of odd twists.

But Levens, a bearded, bespectacled resident of Marina del Rey finds logic in his switch from organic chemistry to worker safety and, finally--in his 60s--to marriage and family counseling.

“I became more and more interested in working with the human equation rather than the purely technological one,” says Levens, 71, whose short stature and quick grin give him the image of a friendly leprechaun.

A native of Boston, Levens moved to Whittier in the early 1950s to work in the laboratory of a large chemical company. But during the following years, Levens--who played the viola in local symphonies--found his interest in the human equation growing stronger.

He left laboratory work and eventually became director of occupational safety and medical services at McDonnell Douglas. Ultimately, his interest in the human equation led him enroll in counseling courses and ultimately to a master’s degree in counseling at age 60.

That’s when Levens was seized by an insight: “I realized I had in my hands a retirement program.”

A year or two later, Levens retired from the aerospace firm and launched a private counseling practice. To this day he pursues it part time, focusing on problems faced by individuals and couples.

As people get older, he says, “a sense of commitment or involvement is as important as oxygen, food, laughter and physical activity.”

The counseling helps provide Levens with his own sense of commitment: “I just enjoy people thoroughly, and I enjoy having people who are troubled by one thing or another pick their heads up and begin to walk forward as whole people whose lives are fulfilled.”

Elements from Levens’ earlier, corporate jobs, he says, sometimes give him insight into the situations of clients who are coping with problems in a corporate environment. “I share my life with them, and they share their lives with me,” he says. “We learn from each other.”

He limits his practice to 10 hours a week and enjoys spending the rest of his time with his wife or visiting his adult son and daughter, who also live in Southern California.

“I think it’s deadly from every point of view to simply sit and vegetate,” he says. “When I find myself doing that, I get very depressed.”

Yet, Levens had no trouble turning down an offer from McDonnell Douglas to work as a consultant about a year ago, in a job that would have required extensive travel away from home.

“It would have been for a very fat fee, but I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore.” Evelyn Freeman has a confession: “I used to be a closet aging person--I did all I could to preserve my youthfulness.”

That may not sound sinister. It’s just that Freeman, 72, is supposed to help people feel comfortable about growing old.

As director of mental health services at Santa Monica’s Senior Health & Peer Counseling Center, she spends much of her time overseeing a program in which senior citizens counsel their peers on aging-related problems.

In addition, she keeps busy during the evenings with a private counseling practice.

It’s a career that has taken off in later life: Freeman, an attractive and quietly imposing woman with curly gray hair, glasses and dangling ivory earrings, earned her doctorate just two years ago.

In an office decorated with plants, civic awards and a small bronze sculpture that she crafted, she says that involvement in meaningful activity, “continues our feeling of being worthwhile and productive, the opposite of being powerless people in society.”

Freeman’s own involvements have been varied. As a child in Highland Park, she dreamed of being a concert pianist or a movie star.

Instead, she went on to raise a family, work as receptionist, make jewelry, earn a master’s degree in counseling, work with her husband--a clinical psychologist--and establish a career as a professional sculptor.

These days, her responsibilities amount to more than a full-time job, though she views her work as something of a mission.

“We find without exception that their lives are benefited enormously,” she says of the volunteer peer counselors she oversees. “We have a number of people who once were clients but now are counselors.”

A key to the peer-counseling program is a training guide Freeman authored that became the basis of her doctoral dissertation. The manual is used in similar programs throughout the country.

As someone who grew up viewing herself as very “dumb,” Freeman looks upon this doctorate in gerontology and psychology as a special achievement. “For once in my life, I wanted someone to say ‘Dr. Freeman’--and mean me, not my husband,” she says with a smile.

But Freeman isn’t joking when she declares that people are able to grow late in life.

“People have the potential to change as long as they live. And that is an exact contradiction to the myth and stereotype that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

When Peggy Schoeny of Silver Lake got ready to end her career with the U.S. Customs Service, she thought about becoming an aerobics instructor.

In the end she made a slightly different choice--at least as far as waistlines are concerned: This 61-year-old retiree opened a bakery.

“It’s a constant battle to control yourself so that you don’t eat all day long,” confesses Schoeny, owner of Kathy’s Kakes in El Monte, a shop that seems to be bursting with colorful treats.

Schoeny, a native Midwesterner, is used to being self-sufficient. She raised five children on her own after an early ‘60s divorce left her a single parent.

By the time she’d reached her mid-50s, she was approaching 30 years of service with the federal government and had risen to senior auditor with the Customs Service in downtown Los Angeles.

At that point, “the question wasn’t whether to retire,” recalled Schoeny, who has neat, snow-white hair and was wearing a pink apron during a recent interview. “It was ‘What am I going to do after I retire?’ The world was wide open.”

She found the answer close to home. Her daughter Kathy was a professional cake decorator. And the mother had learned enough about management to attempt a business venture.

“That’s when we began talking about, ‘What if we had our on bakery?”’ she recalled.

The doors to Kathy’s Kakes opened in late 1982. And that’s when the real work began. For the next three years, Schoeny toiled in her auditor’s job from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m--and then hustled out to the bakery, laboring into the evening.

She also dipped into her life savings, loaning the business monthly amounts ranging from $500 to $3,000 for two years.

“So many people don’t realize how long it will be before the business pays its own way,” she says. “You really need to keep a good job with a good income while you’re establishing that second career.”

Already, the venture has provided Schoeny an unforeseen reward: Her daughter Judy--a former special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service--has joined full time and is learning the art of cake decoration from her twin sister, Kathy.

“This has just turned out to be a dream come true,” Schoeny says. “They never thought they’d be able to work together when they grew up.”

The bottom line also looks favorable, although recent price hikes for sugar, eggs and other products force Schoeny to keep scrupulous track of costs.

Still, she says, “I’m convinced that we’ll have a very successful business here. We’ve just got all the right ingredients.”

Russel L. Lewis first gazed on Los Angeles from the driver’s seat of a Model T more than 50 years ago.

Lewis, a Nebraska transplant, brought more than memories of the Midwest to his new home; he carried a work ethic born of the years he milked cows on his parents’ 160-acre farm before school.

“In Depression days, when other people went broke, my folks didn’t, because we worked hard,” said Lewis, 76, in his Brentwood apartment. “I guess that’s what kept me going after I retired.”

Since retiring from his job as a director of Santa Monica College in 1978, Lewis--whose blue eyes seem to twinkle through his wire frame glasses--has established a new career as a financial planner.

But that’s hardly all he does in a day that begins around 6:30 and typically lasts “late into the night.”

He also serves as president of his building’s condominium owner’s association, as a board member of the Santa Monica YMCA and as an active member of the Rotary Club. He also helps watch after his 92-year-old stepmother, who lives nearby.

“I know I’m getting older but I don’t feel any older than when I was in my 60s,” says Lewis, who abstains from smoking and drinking.

Lewis wasn’t sure what to do with his time after having spent more than 40 years at Santa Monica College, initially as a science teacher.

As retirement approached, he took courses in real estate and toyed with the idea of launching a travel agency, but neither seemed quite right for a second career.

The tough choice was delayed by an opportunity to teach for a year on U.S. military bases in West Germany. But after returning, Lewis found himself puttering about his house, fixing the roof and doing other chores.

“I thought--gee--am I going to spend the rest of my life doing piddling things like that? It’s really not much to look forward to.”

Then he spotted an advertisement for careers in financial services, and a whole new path opened up.

By 1984, he’d become a certified financial planner--and a busy one--selling annuities and advising people on what to do with their savings.

Happily, Lewis’ career as an educator seems to pay off when he tries to explain financial concepts to bewildered clients: “Maybe I’ve been so successful because I’m able to teach people,” he says. “Maybe (financial planners) with more experience aren’t as able to get their message across.”

Asked about all the energy it takes to keep up all his responsibilities, Lewis responds with just a trace of bashfulness: “It’s crazy--but I like it.”