Retirement was not real when you were young. It was what your grandfather did, coming home from the mill and never going back. Years later, your parents retired once college tuitions were behind them. Later still, it was a pleasant reverie after busy workdays. Then your AARP card arrived offering senior discounts and connecting you with retired people who always smiled in the brochures.
You know when it’s your time to go. You give proper notice and encouragement to your successor. There are hugs and handshakes and kind letters. You sleep in the first morning and awake to the rest of your life. Now you are in control of your days. What will you do with them? Will the money you have set aside last for the duration?
Several senior bar executives have retired in recent years. Others are contemplating an exit. Bar Leader spoke recently with seven retirees about their departures and asked each to match their vision of retirement with the reality. Some are experiencing a gradual adjustment to a more relaxed pace. All of them miss the people who became part of their lives. Here are their stories in profile.
Edward M. Bonney, for 25 years the executive director of the Maine State Bar Association, retired at 65 in 1998.
Ed Bonney didn’t know much about the restaurant business, but a quarter-century at the Maine State Bar taught him how to work with people.
Those people skills are on view most weekends at the Maine Dining Room in the Harraseeket Inn, a AAA four-diamond restaurant in Freeport, Maine. Bonney is the ever-gracious host waiting to escort patrons to their tables. He is particularly pleased when past bar leaders come for dinner. “I don’t think we realize how much they mean to us until we’re no longer with them,” he says.
Bonney feels some pangs of “withdrawal” from the daily camaraderie of bar people but finds rewards in retirement. A former air-traffic controller, Bonney now controls his day. “The reality hit me that first Monday morning when I didn’t have to put on my suit and tie and go to work,” he says. “That’s hard to get used to.”
Ed and his wife, Betty, decided to stay active and give each other their “own space.” Betty volunteers at community service centers. Ed is president of the Freeport Economic Development Corp., attracting and retaining business for his hometown. “If it started feeling like a job, we would quit,” he says.
The Bonneys have also traveled, including a meandering journey through Australia. The journal of that trip, written for their three sons and for their grandchildren, became a book.
Ed Bonney suggests people contemplating retirement should “map out what they want to do after they get the closets and cellar cleaned.” He believes retirees must have a financial plan to help stretch funds for the rest of their lives. If not, he jokes, “you can always become a Wal-Mart greeter.”
William J. Carroll, for 23 years the executive director, and 27 years total at the New York State Bar Association, retired at 63 in 2001.
Retirement is a decompression process, according to Bill Carroll. He retired last spring after sensing his energy and enthusiasm were beginning to wane. “Certainly there are moments when you feel like the old firehouse dog, still thinking, What should I be doing?” he says of retirement. “You have to work at being comfortable with a different pace in your life.” Now Carroll enjoys the “quiet time to sit down in the middle of the day and open a book I bought 30 years ago.” Time is precious to him.
Bill Carroll is a lawn man. His house in Delmar, N.Y., sits on a splendidly manicured half-acre: “Crosscutting the grass seems a little pretentious, but I love it,” he says. “It’s just like Yankee Stadium.” Carroll has also taken up golf and a computer class and spends two mornings each week helping fourth-graders learn to read.
Bill and Norma Carroll enjoyed a vacation in Aruba, a gift from the bar. They are heading west this spring and plan a return to Ireland, where he has family. Carroll keeps in casual touch with the bar and recently attended the presidents’ dinner in Manhattan. Their son Tim works there for a brokerage firm near Ground Zero and witnessed some of the carnage of September 11 but was not injured.
“I miss the people I worked with, and our friends all over the country,” Carroll says. “I’m proud of what I left behind but don’t miss dealing with the budget, any of that.” He gave 18 months’ notice and overlapped for two weeks with his successor, Patricia Bucklin. “It worked out well,” Carroll says; the two have talked on the phone as needed.
Carroll offers this nugget of advice to new bar executives: “Always be yourself. You have to bend from time to time, but keep your integrity.”
Bobbie Lou Nailling-Files, for 30 years the executive director of the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association, retired at 60 in 2000.
The familiar “Howyadoin’ darlin’ ” oozes over the long distance line from Leawood, Kan. It is the signature sound of Bobbie Lou Nailling-Files, joined by an impatient yip from her poodle, Sophie.
Nailling arrived at the Kansas City Bar in 1970. “It was a sleepy little bar with a part-time person,” she remembers. “The bar and I grew up together. I had the best job in town.” She made the most of it, but there was the inevitable downside. “It’s very intense ... lying awake at 3:00 a.m. worrying about the next day,” she says.”I was tired. It was time for me to go.” She gave two years’ notice.
Her retirement party reflected the love of members and colleagues. So did the creation of the Nailling Society, with an endowment honoring her service. But retirement was not an easy transition: “At first I had to work real hard to keep from getting depressed,” Nailling recalls. “I didn’t adjust well to not having a routine. I have to keep busy.”
Nailling, now director emeritus of the bar, is also executive director of the bar foundation. She has earned her certification as a personal property appraiser after years of “dabbling in antiques.” She is taking classes in needlepoint and computers and learning to be an auctioneer, “the kind you can understand so you’re not afraid to raise your hand,” she explains.
Nailling’s husband, Richard, who headed an actuarial consulting firm, retired with his wife. She says joint retirement requires a “special adjustment.” The couple built a vacation home with a lighthouse by a lake in Branson, Mo. At press time, they and Sophie were planning to leave soon for a trip south in the family vehicle, which Nailling says is a bus. “Snobs call them motor coaches,” she notes. “We’ll come back when we’re ready.”
The voice on the phone offers hopeful assurance: “There’s life after being a bar exec ... darlin’.”
Susan L. Martin, for nearly 17 years the executive director of the Toledo Bar Association, retired at 58 in 2001.
Sue Martin couldn’t wait to see the sunshine. She enjoyed almost every aspect of bar work—except spending weekdays in a building with very few windows. As she talks to Bar Leader, she is sitting in her kitchen, looking through her bay window and out to the yard, where there are birds and squirrels and, one day soon, a Japanese teahouse beside her flower beds. A budding green thumb, she specializes in bulbs: “How can you kill a bulb?” She apologizes that she may need to take another call. Her niece is having a baby.
“I wanted to leave when I still felt relevant and at the top of my game,” Martin recalls. A former kindergarten teacher, she believes a positive attitude “creates an atmosphere that prevails” in classrooms and bar associations. “Staff and members pick up on it,” she says.
Martin gave three years’ notice and was succeeded by a friend, Patricia Branam. Martin prepared a comprehensive notebook for her successor to help her “make sense of everything” and to allow a seamless transition.
What does she miss about her bar association? “The people and the laughing,” she says.
Her retirement includes some serious travel. “It’s in my blood,” she says. “I love planning trips.” Her husband, Jude Aubry, a lawyer, took her on an “awesome” Alaskan cruise as a retirement gift; as the photo indicates, dogsledding was on the itinerary. She’s going to Italy this spring and cruising the Greek Isles next year.
Martin also wants to be involved in her community. “I was raised that way, to do things for other people,” she says. She is also looking after her mother, who is ill, and, in general, she is trying hard to “find joy and beauty in every day, to appreciate every blessing as it comes.”
The other phone rings. Martin’s niece has delivered a boy. The healthy baby, like the sunshine through the window, is a blessing.
E.A. “Wally” Richter, for 28 years the director of public information for the Missouri Bar, retired at 65 in 1985. Though not exactly a recent retiree, he is well known and, in fact, has an award named after him—thus, we include him here.
The E.A. is short for Ewald Arthur. Wally Richter tells the story that his mother was asked by a neighbor the name of her new son: “When she told him, he said, ‘If you can’t find a better name, you should stop having kids.’ ”
Richter, a former radio station manager, was one of three pioneers in bar communications in 1958. Twenty years later he chaired a conference of NABE’s Communications Section, which produced the Scottsdale I Report. It was a defining document on the role of lawyer-client relationships in shaping public perceptions of the legal profession. The Section later created the E.A. “Wally” Richter leadership award to honor him and all recipients.
“I did a lot of planning for retirement, financial and otherwise,” he says. Unfortunately, his vision of retirement as a time to travel did not materialize. “It was a fiction,” he says. “You don’t know what will happen health-wise.” Richter’s wife, Ruth, seated in the photo at right, is blind and has lived in a nursing home for more than 10 years. Her husband visits twice a day and has also been known to play Santa at the home. They celebrated their 50th anniversary there last June.
Richter has remained active in retirement. He was a consultant for the state bar and taught public relations at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, his alma mater. He headed the local AARP chapter and edits the journal of the Missouri Supreme Court Historical Society. He is waiting for spring: “This time of year I get the itch to dig in the dirt.”
Wally Richter, now 81, misses the “wonderful people” he met in his bar career. “I enjoyed working more than retirement,” he says simply. “We had some good times.”
Ginger Banks, a 25-year employee of the State Bar of Texas, retired at 52 in 2001. She was director of the member services division.
Ginger Banks, the most recent recipient of the E.A. Wally Richter Award, never met the man whose name it bears but is pleased that “he will be on my wall.” She worked for six executive directors of the Texas bar in several key staff positions, from communications to computers to member services.
Banks is “very grateful” for her bar experiences but “it seemed a good time to try other things,” she says. “I was surprised what a breather I needed.” She is exploring options that allow flexibility: “I want to be master of my own schedule, to spend more time traveling and with family and friends.”
Someone once asked why she was apologizing for “doing nothing,” a phrase she has taken to heart. Now, when questioned about retirement, she smiles and simply says: “I’m doing nothing.” “Most people seem envious,” she notes.
Banks visited Switzerland with her mother and sister, who, behind two new canine friends, are both standing to the right of Banks in this photo. They were there on September 11 and were moved by the compassion of the Swiss people. She is spending more midweek time at her lake house in the Texas hill country, taking walks and “feeling like I’m playing hooky.” A lifelong fan of musicals, she has more time for the theater. “If I could go to a musical every night, I’d be happy ... and broke,” she says.
Banks does see a possible downside to having so much leisure time. “I need to be careful not to enjoy this so much my skills get rusty,” she says. “The creativeness, the feeling of making a contribution, are missing now.”
Gilbert R. Campbell Jr. retired in 2000 at age 67 as executive director emeritus after 17 years at the Tennessee Bar Association.
Gil Campbell finds pleasure in the simple gifts of retirement. “My life is much more relaxed,” he says. “I don’t wear socks in the summer.”
He spent 38 years in association management with the chamber of commerce in Atlanta and the Tennessee Bar combined. “It’s not an easy business,” he says. “Once you get to advanced years, it becomes more difficult.” He believes “God has a special place for bar execs. We’ve earned it.”
Campbell lives near Nashville with his wife Matte, a real estate agent. They have two grown children and Cedric, “an old alley cat.” They soon will celebrate their 40th anniversary with an Amazon River cruise. “I’m not going to put my hand in the water,” he says.
Campbell has his hands in several retirement endeavors. He works at home for the Tennessee Supreme Court Historical Society; in the photo at left, he’s examining a document from 1847. He volunteers for the bar foundation and wrote a booklet giving practical advice for new bar executives. A fan of vintage radio shows, he has collected some 300 tapes. Campbell says retirees on limited incomes “can’t live frivolously” but he is “very content” with his new lifestyle.
When we talked, Campbell was preparing to lecture first-year students at Vanderbilt University on the need for poetry in their lives. He thinks they may be too young to appreciate the familiar line from Robert Browning: “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.”
Surely, that is the enduring hope of every retiree.
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