Some people should never retire

My friend Rico, who has owned a hair salon in Maryland for more than 40 years, told me that he never plans to retire. “I don’t know what I would do all day. Besides, I like what I do,” he said.

Neither does Tony Bennett, whose name was Anthony Dominick Benedetto until Bob Hope first heard him sing in 1946 and convinced him to change his name and get into the act.

Bennett, age 90, garnered six standing ovations last Saturday night at the Strathmore Theatre in Rockville, Md. When he sang, “Who can I turn to, when nobody needs me,” he opened up his arms as if to embrace the audience. And we embraced him with deafening applause.

Bennett still practices scales every day. “It’s based on the vowel sounds A, E, I, O, and by doing that, you just warm up ...  Because every day you really feel quite different. By doing the scales, you get a center, and all of a sudden you feel in control of your voice, where it’s relaxed.”

Drake Baer writes in his article titled Maybe you should never retire (The Science of Us, June 6, 2016), “There’s the stack of research indicating that retirement - contra to the endless weekend you might hope it to be - is in fact pretty rough on people. If you like what you do, the best solution might just be to keep doing it.”

Baer cites a new book of interviews with octogenarian designers, “Twenty Over Eighty: Conversation on a Lifetime in Architecture and Design.” Illustrator Seymour Chwast, 86, says, “I don’t understand retiring...I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t play golf. I have to sit at a drawing table or else it’s a wasted day.” Milton Glaser, the iconic designer behind I❤NY, is even more resolute. “To work at things that are central to your life and your perception of yourself, why would you want to retire from that? I want to die at my desk.”

USA TODAY retirement columnist Rodney Brooks interviewed many would-be retirees who have decided to keep working, “Because they would be bored to death and their brains would just shrivel up.”

Comedian Marty Allen was performing at the Thockmorton Theater in California in 2014 when he was 92. Allen was on that fateful show in 1964 when Sullivan introduced the Beatles to America. Allen is still performing stand-up comedy in Vegas. His advice for people getting ready to retire: “Don’t.”

Allen introduced himself to the audience - “Ninety-four years old, and I’ve still got it!” In his self-deprecating style he quips, “But nobody wants it.”

In a November 2012 interview with NPR’s Neal Conan, Tony Bennett shared his passion. “I want to try to prove that at 100, I could sing as well as I was singing when I was 45 or 43. I’d like to prove that if you take care of yourself, you can actually not regret the fact that you’ve become an old-timer, but you can just still improve and actually get better.”

When Tony Bennett began to sing his Grammy-winning, signature song, “I left my heart in San Francisco,” he sounded the same way he did to me when I was a young girl. No, maybe he sounded better.