Arthur C. Nesse Narrative
Warm fire, soft slippers
I wonder what the workers
at headquarters are doing now
These words from a Chinese scholar/bureaucrat some 1500 years ago lend some perspective to the retirement scene. Born in China of U.S. missionary parents, the oriental quest for comfort and serenity are in my psyche if not in my genes. In common with my HBS classmates and my contemporaries, however, busyness (but perhaps only incidentally business) seems to reign in retirement.
On 2-3 days per week I am at a retirement job doing business planning and assorted other work for a software service company. Some community service work, grandparenting, golf and tennis usually supersede contemplation and fire-watching as retirement activities. The academics who study our generation tell us that this is a good thing. At least in this matter we might grudgingly concede that they are probably right.
Three sons, three daughters-in-law, and seven grandchildren distributed as evenly as possible among the three families, form our immediate family. We share holidays and some vacations with them and they with each other as circumstances and geography permit. The oldest three of the grandchildren will be in college as of the fall of 1998. The younger four are early. teenagers and periodic great vacation and recreation companions for us as fond grandparents.
As for me, after three years in the Marine Corps and then HBS I went to work for a division of the former L.O.F. Glass Co. of Toledo, Ohio as a “production engineer”. The job was a by-product of a visit to our fonner Baker Scholar classmate, and my good friend, Jack Reynolds. My production engineering credentials were meager at best, but my MS-inculcated ingenuity stood me in good stead. At HBS the ingenuity was too often applied to getting in an.acceptable (wasn’t the term `satisfactory“?) case study report after week-ending in New Hampshire or singing (low pass) in the church choir my wife directed in Somerville to supplement the GI Bill stipend. She also clerked at the BIBS COOP — you may remember the blonde who sold Harvard neckties and VE RI TAS bookends to the more affluent among us.
At my retirement affair from Ford m= ten years ago I was dubbed “the father” of computing at Ford. There was some truth to this. In the days when a computer needed a $lmillion room and had the computing capability well below today’s laptops, I proposed and managed the programming for Ford’s first large scale computer facility. In the next few years I proposed and “pushed” the construction of a state-of the-art corporate computing center that still functions. Next for some years I set up and manad the systems and computer function of Ford’s largest operational activity. Staff planning and control functions occupied the later years of my 37 years with Ford.
Aside from part-time work and nonnal community activities. I have reactivated interests and friendships going back to early years at an American boarding school on a mountain summer resort in central China. It is now called Jigong (Henan Province). As an alumnae group (mostly children of missionaries as I am) we have had built a granite “Moongate” designed by an architect alunmus of the school. It is a memorial to our time together there and to the 50 or more of our parents and schoolmates buried nearby. In visits over the more recent years we find deep social and emotional ties between the everyday people of China that bridge many years of separation and misunderstanding. In any case, in the fall of 1998 there will be some 30-40 of us Americans on Jigong for a formal and somewhat delayed dedication of the moongate. The local communist parry Bureau of Religious Affairs functionar_yr (a feature of Chinese life today) is being asked to participate in organizing an “appropriate occasion”.
As we become older, and arguably wiser, it seems that the small joys become more and more important. At some point in our lives, a warm fire and comfortable slippers, or a view of squirrels defeating our best efforts to feed the birds, may become legitimately more important than concerns about business, politics or natural disasters. We may not be there yet — but we can look forward to getting there and perhaps one day, with HBS ingenuity, it will be possible for me to outwit the resourceful American squirrel!
ACN 1/19/98