RETIREMENT LOUNGE, THE

LEISURE

FREEDOM'S JUST another word for the retirement blues. The hardest issue the newly retired face most often is not a financial squeeze. It's having all that free time on their hands and not knowing what to do with it. So says Richard E. Grace, a retired Purdue University vice president and engineering professor. Grace, 74, is author of the book When Every Day Is Saturday. He calls it "an engineer's approach to retirement. It's quantitative, not touchy-feely." The heart of the 174-page volume, which is based on research derived from a database of 700 retirees, is a self-assessment quiz. Readers score themselves in seven categories: freedom and leisure; financial independence; separation from work; family and friends; health; helping others. The lower your score in an area, the more likely it will cause you problems.

And what he's hearing back from readers is that freedom confounds them. "That was a surprise," he says, and shows that sound retirement planning should include a blueprint for making constructive use of a sudden overabundance of leisure time. That's especially true for retiring engineering academics who may be used to working many hours a week, he adds.

Grace admits that just before he retired at age 65 from Purdue, after spending 46 years there, he felt "frustrated" because he wasn't sure what to do with himself. He got involved with a local retirement group, which had a database of 1,700 people. And once he got the idea for the book, it was from that base that he culled the 700 respondents of his survey. Grace says most books on retirement tend to focus entirely on finances. And none takes his quantitative approach and allows readers to numerically assess their trouble zones.

Grace, who has to handle all the marketing himself, calls the book-signings and media interviews fun. Like most former teachers, he says, he enjoys an audience.-TG

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Apr 2005
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