At 72, Small Dynamo Makes Big Difference

Upbeat Jean M. Pond uses these bits of sage advice when advising older people what to do with the rest of their lives.

* “Plan to live to be 100, and if you don’t make it, you’re just out a little planning time.”

* “A lady told me she was pushing 70, and I told her it was better pushing it than pulling it.”

* “Another woman who was using her age as an excuse said she was 60, and I told her I was too, 10 years ago.”

* “The old scenario that we retired and then we died isn’t true anymore. We’re living a lot longer and have to make other plans.”

Pond, 72, the founder and unpaid president of the nonprofit Adult Careers Inc. in Irvine, which finds jobs for people 55 and older, has many more of those meaningful one-liners.

But the diminutive dynamo, as the 5-foot-tall Irvine woman is often characterized, talks seriously when discussing jobs for those over 55 and likes to point out that the word retirement is a misnomer.

It really means making a “transition,” she observes.

“I just finished one thing and went on to another,” said the one-time English teacher in junior and senior high school. She made transition moves as an office worker for a hotel supply company, a liberty ship builder during World War II, a bank employee and a construction company secretary before taking her current position.

Pond says she is busier now than ever.

“I wouldn’t work this hard for a living,” joshed the Irvine woman, who heads 32 volunteers, all 55 or older, who have found jobs for 1,140 workers since the program started eight years ago. The job center has 1,300 employers listed in its computer bank.

The reward of it all, she says, is to make even a small difference in another person’s life. “It really is exciting when something happened and you are part of it.”

Pond contends that it is an uphill battle.

“Our people are not as attractive to the marketplace as a 25-year-old, so we only work with enlightened employers that come to us,” said Pond, married to Robert Pond for 46 years. “They are looking for maturity and a work ethic.”

Pond believes that older people have a psychological need to work, not necessarily because of economics. “Everyone needs to feel they have value for their own self-esteem,” said Pond, who often addresses community groups.

And when she does, “I like to talk to young people and to people of my own age group,” she said. “Young people and old people have more in common and get along better than they do with middle-age people.”

Pond adds: Middle-age people are caught up in such traumas as mortgages and kids in college and don’t have the same idealism that old and young people can have.”

Pond likes to talk about needs for older people besides finding them jobs. Most important, she feels, is the need for older people to have their own independence.

Other top priorities include the need for post-retirement planning and new guidelines for long-term care.

Despite the seriousness of needs for the elderly, Pond often finds devilish humor and fun in her work and herself.

“Someone called the office and asked me if he could talk with someone that has been through more than one recession,” Pond said. “I asked him if he wanted me to talk about the one following the Spanish-American War.”

Since 1977, fifth-grade science teacher Michael Haas has been promoting an anti-tobacco campaign to his students at El Morro Elementary School in Laguna Beach.

Each year he provides kits to his class to build a respiratory system that draws smoke of one pack of nonfiltered cigarettes through the model lung.

It shows the tar and nicotine residue left behind.

“It started as a teaching tool to show how a person’s lungs work, and we made it more sophisticated to show the harm cigarettes cause to the lungs,” said Haas, 55, a teacher for 33 years.

The classroom project, sponsored by the Orange County Medical Assn. Auxiliary Tobacco Free California campaign, recently won $1,000 from the California Medical Assn. Auxiliary.