Smithsonian Portrays the Elderly at Work : Art: Harvey Wang’s studies of people laboring in disappearing trades inspired the exhibit.

Hallie Stillwell has been a teacher, a cowgirl, a newspaper columnist, a storekeeper and a justice of the peace. There’s one thing she’s never done: Sit and do nothing. At 97, she’s not planning to start.

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“As long as I’m able to be on two feet, I’ll be working,” Stillwell said from her west Texas ranch.

Jack Betteil is the same. He’s been fixing things--first radios, then TVs and VCRs--since he came to New York City at age 19, a Polish Jew orphaned by the Holocaust.

“I’d be unhappy if I couldn’t do something with my hands,” said Betteil, 72. “I couldn’t possibly just sit around.”

An early retirement heavy on fishing or golf or travel may be the capper to the American Dream, but it doesn’t interest everyone. For some, work is its own reward.

You can see it in the faces of Stillwell, pleased with herself after officiating at yet another wedding, and Betteil, content among his wires and picture tubes. Their portraits, along with 35 others bearing the same easy dignity, make up a Smithsonian exhibit, “Going Strong! Older Americans on the Job.”

Curator David H. Shayt was inspired by Harvey Wang’s series of black-and-white portraits of New Yorkers laboring in disappearing trades--hand-stuffing feather pillows, filling seltzer bottles, digging graves by shovel instead of backhoe.

When the curator learned that Wang was traveling the country, photographing all sorts of elderly workers from logger to minister to newspaper editor, he knew he had the makings of a show for the Museum of American History. The exhibit will run through Oct. 28.

“The wrinkles, the calloused hands, the soiled jacket, the rusty zipper. The messed-up shop that looks like a war zone,” Shayt said. “It’s real. It’s uncontrived.”

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On the wall of the Smithsonian, great-grandmother Roberta Blackgoat herds sheep in Big Mountain, Ariz. Victor Gellineau of New York City paints names on the Empire State Building’s frosted glass doors.

Alongside them are John Causarano of New York City, the blacksmith; Harold C. Cotton of Greensboro, N.C., the hat blocker; Lucy Pearson of Pearsonville, Calif., who sells hubcaps; and Dorothy Donegan of New York City, a jazz pianist.

Many of the photographs are from “Harvey Wang’s New York,” published in 1990. Others will appear in the book entitled, “Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes,” a collaboration with National Public Radio reporter David Isay, due out in October.

The exhibit allows only a peek at working lives.

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After all, Stillwell took her first job in 1916. A teacher in the border town of Presidio, Tex., she tucked a six-shooter in her skirt to fend off Mexican revolutionaries. She married a cowboy in 1918, and helped build a 22,000-acre ranch, a store and a campground. On the side, she writes a weekly column for the newspaper in nearby Alpine, Tex.

Betteil gave up his storefront in Queens, N.Y., after 37 years, when the rent climbed too high. Now he fixes televisions at a friend’s shop. The rest of his time goes to sculpting Native American faces out of hardwood and painting them bright colors, a passion he can’t quite explain.

Once in a while, he carves a face he remembers from the concentration camps that nearly killed him.

Some of the Smithsonian staff criticized Shayt’s exhibit for failing to note that many elderly Americans keep working because they can’t afford to retire.

“They said I romanticized work,” said Shayt, sitting in front of a photograph of a white-bearded silver prospector, age 77. “But I look at these faces and I say, ‘Would these people really retire if they had more money? Is that the only reason they work?’ I don’t think so.”