14 Years Ago In TIME

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, David Robinson and Rebecca Winters

Retirees today are fretting over shrinking nest eggs, and workers wonder when they'll ever get to rest. But when TIME ran a cover story in 1988 on the GOLDEN YEARS, the theme was new opportunities.

It is not just that the elderly are living longer, healthier lives. They are living them differently ... In some places it seems a wholly different, more leisurely universe, full of choices and passions long delayed. There is Hulda Crooks, 91, who has climbed 97 mountains since she turned 65, most recently Mount Fuji in Japan. And Dentist James Jay, 74, who finished, along with 51 other septuagenarians and four octogenarians, that 26-mile ribbon of pain, the New York City Marathon ... But these days, many of those over 65 who prepared themselves for a life of leisure found they were not cut out for it. For them, the greatest luxury of retirement is returning to work--on their own terms. Robert Pamplin, 76, former head of the Georgia-Pacific Corp., prudently began plotting his corporate afterlife 10 years before he reached his company's mandatory retirement age. In 1976, on his 65th birthday, he bought a small sand-and-gravel company. Ten years and two other acquisitions later, he oversees a small empire with revenues of $420 million. Pamplin saw his postretirement course as a sort of duty. "God has given us certain talents," he says. "And he gave them to us to use." --TIME, Feb. 22, 1988