For these psychologists, retirement has been no time for slowing down

By Jamie Chamberlin
Monitor staff

For seven years, psychologist Marvin White, PhD, kept a shoebox under his desk in the office of his private practice in Knoxville, Tenn., and whenever he thought of a new area he wanted to explore when he retired, he wrote it on a Post-itŪ note and dropped it in.

White, who retired in 1993, has already accomplished almost every goal he filed away in that box, including learning how to run a television station and teaching driving courses to senior citizens. Learning to speak Spanish is the only one left. 'That can wait until I can?t get around anymore,' he says playfully.

Like White, many professionals are no longer treating retirement as a time for rest or the end of their work life. Instead, they are using it as a time to grow, diversify and start new careers.

Meet five extraordinary APA members who have each retired at different points in their lives and careers, but who have all embraced retirement as an opportunity to launch a new stage of life.

Student and teacher

After 33 years as a practicing psychologist, White, 67, says he was relieved to retire. He misses the challenge of running a private practice each day, he says, but he doesn?t miss the stress. That?s why the first thing he did in retirement was learn how to run something easier?a television station. White sold his private practice at age 62 and moved with his wife to a retirement community in Highland Lakes, Fla. His retirement community was interested in launching its own station, so White took a job working as a volunteer at a local television studio at Lake Sumter Community College to learn how it operates. He?s worked there for the last four years and has learned to do almost everything?camera work, sound work, directing and editing?everything but machine repair.

'I am intentionally avoiding that one,' he says. His retirement community has not established a station yet, but it gets closer to that goal as White?s knowledge of the television business grows.

White?s other post-retirement plans involved teaching. He runs a dog obedience class once a week, and occasionally he trains horses, one of his hobbies since childhood. He uses the Monty Roberts methods of horse training that have been recently popularized by two books, The Horse Whisperer and The Man Who Listens to Horses. He also teaches a refresher course on safe-driving techniques for senior citizens through terican Association of Retired Persons (AARP), called the 55/Alive program. He maintains his ties to psychology by volunteering as a mental health technician at the Red Cross. For fun, he plays the bass fiddle in a bluegrass band.

Being a psychologist has helped him deal with some of the challenges involved with retiring, he says. 'You can have a reaction of depression when you leave the rat race, and being a psychologist helped me get through that,' he says. 'There were also some clients that I really hated to let go of, and that I felt uneasy about leaving. It?s like your children , you send them out in the world and you wonder if the world is going to treat them right or not.'

Teaching abroad

The University of Oklahoma?s 'Rule of 80' sparked retirement for psychologist Gene Walker, PhD. The rule held that if an instructor?s years of service and chronological age added up to 80, he or she could retire. (The sum has since been changed to 90, due to the rule?s immense popularity.)

Walker, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of training in pediatric psychology at the University of Oklahoma Medical School, saw retirement as an opportunity to return to classroom teaching. His post at the medical school had become primarily administrative and he was interested in adult education and traveling. So Walker, at 57, decided to see where freelance teaching could take him. 'It is amazing what I found,' he says. 'It was just a matter of letting it be known that I was available.'

Walker has maintained strong ties with the University of Oklahoma, working for several different programs. The most exciting, he says, is his work as an instructor for a master?s program in human relations that the university offers for military personnel on U.S. bases around the world. Walker has taught courses on bases in Guam, Japan, Italy, Iceland, Korea, Belgium and Germany.

One month before Walker is due to arrive at a base, he sends a syllabus to his students, who spend the next three or four weeks reading and doing assignments to prepare for his class. When he arrives, he teaches for one week?each evening for four hours and all day on Saturday and Sunday?and the students earn two credit hours for the course. Walker is free to explore and sightsee on weekdays. He usually teaches three or four classes abroad each year and another four or five in the United States.

Between trips, Walker works as adjunct professor for the University of Oklahoma?s psychology department and teaches in the university?s College of Liberal Studies. At Oklahoma City University, he teaches a research methods course for the university?s masters in counseling program, as well as social psychology and a class called 'Great Experiments in Psychology' as part of their PLUS (Prior Learning + University Studies) program. Last year he was a visiting professor at a medical school in Guadalahara, Mexico. In addition to teaching, he works as a research consultant for several agencies and companies, and he has four books under contract.

'I have found that I am working more hours than when I had a job, but I am only doing things that I enjoy, so it doesn?t seem like work, and I don?t particularly want to stop,' he says.

One of the most rewarding things he?s done since retiring, he says, is traveling to the places where he grew up. Walker visited his childhood homes in Pennsylvania and Ohio and took the time to teach a seminar at his undergraduate alma mater, Geneva College in Pennsylvania.

Life?s greatest transition

When psychologist C. Kermit Phelps, 90, tells people that retirement is about going toward something, not away from something, he has his own life to offer as proof. In 20 years of retirement, he has experienced a lifetime of adventures and accumulated a remarkable list of achievements.

Phelps views retirement as an adjustment period, not a time to slow down.

'It?s not a question of retiring so you can rest,' he says. 'Just nix the word ?retirement? and see this as another transition in life.'

When Phelps 'transitioned' from the Kansas City Veterans Admistration hospital in 1978, he launched a career that centered on helping others adjust to and embrace retirement.

From 1982 to 1988 he held three major positions with AARP: He served as a member of the national board of directors for two years, vice chairman of the board for two years and chairman of the board for two years.

During his term as chairman, Phelps visited AARP chapters in every state but North Dakota. AARP also recruited their 21 millionth member during that period, and Phelps had the privilege of presenting that new member to then-President Ronald Reagan in a ceremony honoring AARP enrollment.

Phelps also spearheaded the development of Shepherds Center, a senior citizens center that originated in Kansas City and has expanded to 160 locations across the United States. Phelps and members of the Kansas City community wanted to start a center that was run by people over 65 and offered more opportunity for personal growth than traditional senior centers. Phelps and the other organizers worked for two years to secure funding for the project. The center offers programs such as Adventures in Learning?which offers classes in Spanish, French and creative arts?and Phelps? own invention, a program called Life Enrichment, which helps older people grow emotionally. Phelps ran the Life Enrichment groups for many years, and now he helps other Shepherds centers set up similar programs.

Phelps gives invited lectures on aging at community centers, church groups, PTAs, health centers and mental health groups throughout Kansas City. He also works with a federal program that offers two-day pre-retirement seminars for federal employees who are nearing retiring. 'The point I make is that they don?t retire from something, they retire to something,' he says. 'We want to keep them flexible in all areas?social, intellectual and physical?so they can welcome the change and adapt to it.'

Cyber-retire

Psychologist Sheridan Fenwick, PhD, 55, probably did not expect to live in cyberspace after she retired. Italy, maybe, but not cyberspace.

Fenwick retired after 14 years from her job as director of the Behavioral Medicine Clinic, a group practice of 10 psychologists based at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. Four years ago, she launched PsyBar, a company that helps law firms, corporations, insurance companies and government agencies find psychological or psychiatric experts for court cases. Her business operates primarily over the Internet. Fenwick started PsyBar with her colleague, psychologist David Fisher, PhD. Each had gained experience in forensic work throughout their career and had started to integrate their ideas about how some aspects of forensic psychology could be improved. The pair was inspired to start the business in 1993 when the Supreme Court decision of Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals raised the standard for expert testimony on science in the courts.

PsyBar matches psychologists and psychiatrists with court cases based on the specific credentials and geographical location of the experts. Fenwick and Fisher have recruited more than 400 psychologists and psychiatrists around the country.

Two forces affected Fenwick?s decision to retire: First was her growing unease with the health-care market; she found she was spending more time on the phone with health-care administrators than with her patients. Second, her daughter was starting high school and Fenwick wanted to be more involved in her daughter?s life before she left home for good. 'I wouldn?t say that I work less than I did before,' says Fenwick.

But her lap-top computer allows her to stay involved with her business while devoting time to equally important matters, such as checking out potential schools across the country with her now college-bound daughter. She also has the flexibility to focus on other activities, such as playing doubles tennis competitively and even cruising the Amazon River in Peru last Christmas with her family and friends.

A man of many words

'Raymond Corsini is more productive in a year of retirement than most of us are in our careers,' says psychologist Danny Wedding, PhD, a colleague and friend of Corsini. Corsini, 84, retired eight years ago from a private practice in Honolulu. He has devoted the last four years to producing a dictionary of psychology that will be twice as large and more comprehensive than any existing one, he says. He works on his dictionary every day?carefully considering each word he will include. Taylor and Francis will publish the dictionary in 1999.

Corsini loves publishing, and retired specifically to have more time to write and edit books. He has published 40 books and more than 100 journal articles throughout his career, including the award-winning 'Encyclopedia of Psychology' (John Wiley & Sons,1994), a four-volume work that he revised in 1994 and abridged three times since then. He also edited 'Current Psychotherapies,' (F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., 1995) the leading text in psych-otherapy, which Corsini recently revised for the fifth edition.

Corsini, who was trained in the theories of Alfred Adler and Carl Rogers, worked as a prison psychologist and as professor at the University of California?Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology and has lectured at more than 15 colleges and universities.

He moved to Honolulu in 1965 after he married his wife Kleona, a physician. Within weeks of his arrival, he started his private practice and started the Family Education Centers of Hawaii, where he served as a volunteer counselor for more than 20 years.

Recently, Corsini was cited as one of the 500 most significant psychologists worldwide since 1850 in the Biographical Dictionary of Psychology.

Nevertheless, he had a history of poor academic performance throughout his education, he says, and it took him until age 41 to earn his PhD. This was the main reason he developed a new school system, known as the Corsini 4-R System of Individual Education, a system he thinks he would have done well in.

The system attempts to provide individualized instruction to every student and depends strongly on standardized tests.

This system has started in a total of 12 schools, including one in Canada, Holland and Israel, and Corsini continues to promote its growth. The system will be the subject of his next book, he says.

As one of psychology?s leading experts in psy-chotherapy and Adlerian psychology, Corsini gives lectures and invited addresses around the world. But he spends most of his time in Honolulu, sailing each Saturday on his boat that he named after his wife.

'Corsini?s love of life and continued commitment to the profession of psychology is inspiring,' says Wedding. 'He is a model of a life well-lived.'