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From WSJDN
Second Acts
What do you do for an encore? Here are portraits of people who are taking new paths—and changing their lives.
Many people take classes in later life to brush up on their skills or simply exercise their brains. Few older adults, though, take aim at a graduate degree. Gail Marlow Taylor, age 65, is three years into a full-time Ph.D. program in history at the University of California, Irvine.
“Most of my fellow students… don’t seem to notice I’m more than twice their age,” says Ms. Taylor, who is also older than most of her professors. “I fit right into the group, because we are all pulling toward the same goal.”
Ms. Taylor worked for 30 years as a medical technologist, managing hospital information systems. As an undergraduate, she started out studying history but switched to biology. While she enjoyed her career, she always regretted giving up history.
“History… shows how connected we all are through time,” Ms. Taylor says. She is working toward a dissertation on 16th-century herbal remedies, studying how discoveries in the New World affected medical science in Germany at the time. “It might sound esoteric, but my work brings together my passions: biology, languages, history, travel and medicine.”
Ms. Taylor traces her love of learning to her childhood. Her father was a professor who taught in the U.S. and Iran and did graduate work in Switzerland. She always made time for reading, even when she was busy working and raising four children with her husband, Charles. While still employed, she earned a master’s in history at California State University, Fullerton.
“Once I got my master’s, I was disappointed it was over, so I thought, ‘Why not carry on and get a Ph.D.?’ “ Ms. Taylor recalls. “To do that, I had to cut the umbilical cord to my paycheck and become a full-time student.”
She retired in 2008 and joined the Irvine Ph.D. program. Ms. Taylor works as much as 80 hours a week during the school year teaching undergraduates, studying, attending classes, writing papers and grant proposals, and conducting research. She spends summers reconnecting with her eight grandchildren and traveling with her husband to Europe to do research. Last week she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, which will take her to Germany for a year.
“I must admit, I didn’t really know what I was getting into,” says Ms. Taylor, who hopes eventually to land a job as an adjunct professor. “But I’m a goal-driven person, so I might as well go all the way.”
Finally, Pizza
For most of his adult life, Paul Giannone worked with computers. But he never particularly enjoyed his job or even felt he was especially good at it.
“I picked my career because I made good money, but I had absolutely no passion for it,” says Mr. Giannone, who spent nearly 20 years at AT&T and two of its spinoffs before taking early retirement in 2001.
What Mr. Giannone had always been passionate about was pizza. He still remembers the names of the pizzerias in his childhood home of Brooklyn, N.Y.—Spumoni Gardens, Pizza Wagon and Gino’s, among others. The settings, he says, were just as important as the food: neighborhood restaurants where family and friends could gather over thin-crust pies.
After retiring, Mr. Giannone worked as an information-technology consultant for nine years. But while traveling the U.S. to client sites, he spent more time thinking about where to get a good pizza than how to set up computer systems. “I just couldn’t get pizza out of my head,” he says. He became an avid reader of, and contributor to, pizza blogs, restaurant-review sites and chef forums.
Gradually, Mr. Giannone’s thoughts turned to starting his own pizzeria. “I didn’t just want to open a place that turned out hundreds of pies to make money,” he recalls. “I wanted to be creative in my cooking.”
After building a backyard pizza oven to hone his technique, he leased a homey space in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood in November 2009. The restaurant, Paulie Gee’s, opened in March 2010.
“The day I signed the lease, I was terrified, but I saw a wall of fear and walked through it,” says Mr. Giannone, now 57. “I work six days a week from midday through midnight, but I don’t feel like I’m working. My job is like having friends over, making pizza and hanging out. I can’t believe I get paid to do this.”
Heavy Lifting
Lisa Fisco was a single mom of three boys working at a breakneck pace in the television industry when her health bottomed out.
“My life was so stressful, and I was so exhausted that I overate,” says Ms. Fisco, now 50. “I still thought of myself as I had been in college, an athletic rugby and soccer player, but one day I looked in the mirror and was shocked to see I had gained over 100 pounds.”
Ms. Fisco knew she had to get fit, but didn’t just join a gym or start jogging. She decided to train for the Olympic weight-lifting team.
“I had always loved lifting weights,” Ms. Fisco says. “It was something I did with my dad growing up. When I searched my soul for what I was passionate about, I kept coming back to two things: weight lifting and the Olympics. I am absolutely obsessed with the Games.”
She wrote to Olympic weight-lifting coach Mike Burgener and clearly spelled out her goal: a 46-year-old, out-of-shape mom would like to train for a shot at the 2012 Games.
“I told him, ‘I have hopes for the gold,’ and I thought he would tell me to go join a mom’s group or something, but he emailed me back saying he’d love to help,” says Ms. Fisco.
She began training while still working full time as a TV producer. She soon realized she couldn’t continue at that pace. So she quit her job, moved to Camarillo, Calif., and took a less stressful position selling advertising. Nearby was a gym with Olympic-grade weight-lifting equipment, where she bumped into Tom Delong, another Olympic weight-lifting coach, who had just moved to the area. “It was serendipity,” says Ms. Fisco.
She now trains five or six days a week—five hours a day, split into two intense sessions—with Mr. Delong. She has lost 100 pounds and is slimming down further to make a lower weight class. If she achieves her goal of making the 2012 Olympic team, which requires her to win several competitions later this year, she’ll be the oldest Olympic weight lifter in history.
Though the financial challenges are daunting—Ms. Fisco has a couple of sponsors, but training is expensive—she has few regrets. “My whole life is about the Olympics now, and I won’t give up,” she says. “If I don’t make it in 2012, there is always 2016.”
An Activist Evolves
For some people in later life, a full-time passion for doing good can work just as well on a part-time basis.
In the late 1970s, Dick Kamp was living in Bisbee Junction, Ariz., running an auto-wrecking yard, working part time at the post office, and generally living like a “quasi-hippy with a non-career.” Then he was driven to become a political activist. Nearby, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, two large copper smelters were spewing out massive toxic plumes. “The air quality in the area was horrid,” says Mr. Kamp, now 62.
In 1983, he started a nonprofit group, the Border Ecology Project. Through political pressure, technical research and media campaigns, the group helped get a U.S.-Mexico treaty passed that reduced heavy-metal emissions and controlled hazardous-waste dumping in both countries.
But in 2004, the Mexican co-director of the organization died. Without his longtime colleague, Mr. Kamp was thrown for a loop. “I had lived and breathed Border Ecology Project for two decades, but I felt lost,” he recalls. The organization was also struggling to raise funds.
“I was 56 and had to decide what to do with the next part of my life.” He thought about starting a new nonprofit, but realized that his priorities had changed.
“Running a nonprofit is an extremely unstable way to make a living, and I knew I needed more stability in my later years for myself and my family,” says Mr. Kamp, who has four daughters and now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., with his wife.
Having published many freelance articles about environmental science over the years, Mr. Kamp approached the newspaper group Wick Communications, based in Sierra Vista, Ariz., for a job. He now reports on environmental issues for the company’s stable of local papers.
But a day job wasn’t enough for Mr. Kamp, who has activism in his blood. He soon began assembling an advisory group of scientists, engineers, attorneys and academics to form a new nonprofit called E-Tech International. The nonpartisan organization provides technical consulting to communities, govern ments and agencies involved in large-scale development projects in less-industrialized countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru. The goal is to help communities obtain “skeptical due diligence” on the potential impact of industrial development on human health and the environment.
Mr. Kamp and two colleagues run the organization in their spare time.
“This is my part-time nonprofit,” says Mr. Kamp, who spends about 25 hours a week working on E-Tech, outside of his full-time job as a journalist. “It’s an insane pace, but I love what I do, so I just keep going.”
