Gray Hair Can Wash Years of Success Down the Drain

For 15 years, Vince Boyle was on the other side, the side that hired and fired, the side that came up with all sorts of creative excuses for handling the unpleasantries of corporate personnel policy.

As vice president for human resources, Boyle was in on the power meetings. He knew the mind set well.

“It’s not what’s written down,” he says. “It’s what’s said in the boardroom that counts. . . . It’s a feeling, a psychological feeling.”

So when the time came, nobody spelled it out. Vince Boyle says he knew what was coming all the same.

“I could see the bullet headed straight at me.”

At 56 years old, Vince Boyle was too old, a virtual relic in the leaner, meaner world of corporate America. His company, an international financial firm in Newport Beach, preferred to call his departure part of a reorganization.

“I was the only one who had gray hair and some of them were older than me,” Boyle says. “This was a joke in our company. Then you see them on the street, after we were all let go, and they all look like me. They were dyeing their hair.”

That was six years ago. Boyle hasn’t had a steady job since.

He takes what he can find, which isn’t much. His wife works. He volunteers. He sends out resumes, hundreds and hundreds of them. Most aren’t acknowledged.

Vince Boyle has done everything right. Except grow older.

Jim Young, who will be 65 this month, left Texaco voluntarily after 17 years, seeking new challenges. He started his own oil-refining company, a small operation in Signal Hill, and more than tripled his income. In 1979, his best year, he reported an income of $92,000 to the IRS.

When the industry began hurting, and his company went belly up, Young became executive director of an industry-lobbying group for 15 months. That ended in 1984.

Today, listed last among the “highlights of qualifications” on his two-page resume, is this: Mature, dependable and very personable with good sense of humor .

That helps.

Young has had to sell his house. For the past two years, he’s been rooming with his ex-wife in her mobile home in Huntington Beach. He can’t find a good job. Potential employers tell him that he’s overqualified. He says that he’ll take way less.

They don’t answer his letters. They say they’ll keep his name on file. They lie.

“They equate being old with being all used up,” Jim Young says.

For the past five months, Young has been working behind the deli counter at a Ralphs supermarket, serving salads and slicing cold meats. The department manager is 26 years old. Young earns $5.75 an hour, working on the average about 25 hours a week. He wishes that they would put him on full time.

Stanley Vitt, who lives in Orange, has a similar story. At 60 years old, he takes what he can, a little here and there. He is divorced; his two children grown. He has cleaned out the college fund that he set up for them years ago.

Three years ago in January, Vitt and 41 other professionals were let go. He was a national sales manager--in the wrong division. His company, in the machine-tool industry, shut it down.

“For about a year after I was laid off, I thought I could get back into the industry,” he says. “I went on probably 30, 40 interviews. After about 20, 30 minutes, I’d be out the door, or they’d keep me there an hour, telling me that I was overqualified, that I was too senior a manager.”

Vitt, Young and Boyle are friends. They met through their involvement with Rancho Santiago College’s now-defunct Older Worker Task Force, of which Vitt was chairman.

They’ve talked to all sorts of community groups in Orange County. They can spout statistics, they can dispel myths. They are in good health, eager to work and contribute.

The men talk of the graying of America, the declining birth rate, the downsizing of corporations nationwide, the two-way street that is company loyalty and the shortsightedness of companies that value youth over experience.

The county’s official unemployment rate of 3% doesn’t include older workers such as them, who have been out of work for more than six months, who may be listed as “early retirees.”

“We’ve defined the problem,” Young says. “But you don’t get anywhere just defining it. We haven’t cracked that wall of age discrimination, which is alive and well.”

“We’re part of a throwaway society,” Boyle says. “They should use us for Earth Day, recycle us.”

We are having this conversation in my office, exchanging bits of horror stories about the realities of the workplace in Orange County, where youth reigns supreme.

Young tells of a co-worker at Ralphs who thinks that he’s quite a brain. He explained to her that the deli scale with the digital display interprets .25 as a quarter-pound. She had no idea why that would be.

At the pizza parlor that he owned a few years back, Boyle noticed that the workers had lined up their watches on a shelf near the front counter. He asked them to put them in the back, out of public view.

Then one of Boyle’s six children, who was managing the restaurant, explained why the watches were there. The employees didn’t know how to read the clock on the wall. The watches’ digital displays told them the time.

The men say they’ve given up on self-pity, that now they’re just talking common sense.

“Ten years from now, we would not be sitting around here having this conversation,” Young tells me. “Industry, businesses, will be forced to hire older workers. Demographics do not support today’s attitude.”

After about an hour and a half, the men take their leave. They’re heading for lunch together, to talk some more. They’ve got time to spare.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.