Published in The Sentinel Star (now The Orlando Sentinel), Orlando, Florida, in late 1981 or early 1982. The paragraphs look longer when squeezed into a newspaper column!
EUSTIS -- After two days of retirement, Bill Ivey said he "couldn't take it" and began job hunting. He was 66.
Ivey, who had devoted most of his life to counseling alcoholics, went to work in Georgia at a "youth development center" -- the polite term for a reform school, he says -- interviewing and writing up case histories. He was there 1½ years.
Again he thought he might retire but "couldn't stand not doing anything", so he returned to preaching. (Starting at age 30, he had been a Presbyterian minister and pastor of a church in Wolcott, N.Y., for 13 years.)
He is 83 today and doesn't give retirement a thought anymore. He moved to Eustis in 1969, and two years ago, a friend suggested he go to work for Open Door in Lake County, a rehabilitative program for youthful offenders. He talked to the program's director, Larry Ogle, and agreed his friend's advice was good. He volunteered, and today works for the Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) of Lake County, sponsored by Open Door Inc.
"This is my primary interest," he says. He puts in about 15 hours a week, working with clients of Open Door and with the Lake County Council On Aging, of which he is vice president.
His pay is the satisfaction he gets from helping others, but he says: "This has been a lifesave for me, giving me something to do where I feel I am useful. If I was inactive, I wouldn't be here today."
He started in Open Door by teaching the program's counselors. But today, his big interest is promoting RSVP as a member of that organization's board of trustees.
Although he chose the ministry as his vocation, Ivey did his master's thesis on the psychiatric approach to problems of personality.
"My seminary did not know what to do with me," he says, adding that they had never heard of a ministry student studying psychiatry.
Subsequently, Ivey went to a New York City hospital for mental patients to do his residency.
It was during World War II, when he enlisted in the Army as a chaplain, that he got his background experience for counseling. He was assigned to an Army transport ship for 3½ years, taking troops to the war zones.
He was a major when he came out of the service in 1945, and he had a lieutenant colonel's rank in the reserve. He chose to work in the chaplaincy with the Veterans Administration. He was assigned to a hospital in Illinois with 2,400 mental patients. He remained there for seven years.
"It was here that I first got interested in alcoholics. I'd studied this when I worked on my master's."
He stayed with the VA for 22 years; much of this time he devoted to helping the alcoholic. He worked in this field from the mid-1940s through the 1950s.
He organized alcoholism seminars in Illinois and Wisconsin. The Washington office of the VA transferred him to the Milwaukee center in the early 1950s. This center had about 300 patients suffering from alcoholism.
"I know how to deal with mental patients from firsthand experience. I've sat in on the 'Snake Pits'. Every conceivable kind of human problem, I have dealt with. But there is no answer for the alcoholic -- why they drink."
Ivey doesn't counsel on alcoholism anymore. "I'm convinced that in nine out of 10 cases -- the vast majority of alcoholics -- their only hope is Alcoholics Anonymous."
He says he will continue to give his services to helping people with problems for as long as he is needed and is able. He says the talent senior citizens have to offer "is utterly going to waste; the state is filled with talented senior citizens.
"At Open Door," he says, "we could find a job for everybody who volunteered. We need these people."
For Ivey, "retiring" has provided him with a wonderful opportunity to go to work, using his knowledge in a continuing effort to help.