Retirement’s not for everybody; some just keep on keepin’ on
People retire every day. I still do. Every day. But some people never really retire and just “keep on keepin’ on,” as folk singer Len Chandler sang in the song with that title back in the ’60s. The phrase is almost a cliché now. The words still resonate, though.
Legendary News-Gazette sportswriter Loren Tate, who’s 94, and my grandfather Walter Newberry, who was 89 when he passed, never seemed to retire and kept working as always. A little slower, perhaps, but still at it. These two from different walks of life and from different eras came to mind recently. They kept at it, long after others would have hung it up, and have created an admirable and exemplary legacy.
Loren Tate is still going strong, writing a column once a week, doing pregame shows and four other weekly radio shows, attending football practice and games, and popping up around town. Same as he’s done for years. An article in the News-Gazette a few days ago reported that it was his 60th anniversary with the paper. Now that’s keepin’ on.
As you would know from the article about Tate in the paper, he spent two years in the Army after college, then worked as a sportswriter in Hammond, Ind., for 11 years — can you imagine if he hadn’t come to the News-Gazette as a sportswriter and covered the Illini, and he would have become a legendary Indiana sportswriter, instead writing about Hoosiers rather than the Illini? That’s 71 total years of sports writing, and he can tell and write stories like they happened yesterday.
I once told Tate that I’d been an Illini fan for about as long as I can remember and mentioned the 1951 football team as the first one I recalled. Tate nodded and went on to say that that was a great team and that he knew them all and had written about them. I remembered listening to them on the radio and had some favorite players but couldn’t remember the names.
But unlike Tate who can probably give stats on any player, game or year, I had to Google to refresh my childhood memory to find my favorite players from that team, halfback Johnny Karras and fullback Bill Tate. The Illini won the Big Ten championship that year with a 9-0-1 record and outscored their opponents 220-83. That’s the kind of information Tate can recite at the drop of a hat to this day.
In a recent column, he posed a question about whether the challenges to adding Gies to Memorial Stadium will “bring about a change.” After a brief comment that “the stadium was originally built for those killed in World War I,” he answered his question: “No, the effort to strike the Gies name won’t fly.”
He’s probably right, sadly, regarding honoring the memory of those students, staff and alumni who had made the ultimate sacrifice for this country in time of war. Money talks, and honor fades.
I always thought of retirement as being able to do essentially what you wanted, and I have no doubt that Tate is doing just what he wants to be doing after 71 years.
My maternal grandfather sort of retired because he wanted to, mostly. His wife (my grandmother) had passed away, he was past 70 when he quit farming for himself with prodding from his two daughters, and came to live with us. But he didn’t really retire. He drove a tractor in the field and farmed and fed cattle with my father until my grandfather was past 80, and even then he still put in a full day in the field. That was from a little after sunrise to about sundown.
I was just a kid in my early teens then, and I’d be so tired working with my dad and couldn’t see how my grandfather could keep going. He could stand the heat, the cold, the rain, the snow and still do as well as the next one. He once rode a horse down from my aunt and uncle’s house one day to our home in Bellair from six miles north of Moonshine, about 15 miles all together, to give me the horse. But my mother wouldn’t let me have the horse and saddle, so he rode it back that evening.
He continued putting out a half-acre or more garden with corn, tomatoes, green beans, carrots, radishes, onions, and other vegetables to eat and can. Awhile later my mother quit canning due to her health, and I could hardly drink canned tomato juice. We ate well, back then. So did the neighbors.
When his older brother was ill, my grandfather dropped everything and went out on a train to help care for him on his fruit ranch in Santa Rosa, Calif. That was one of the trials and tribulations of life. Not being a train traveler, he erroneously received a ticket to Santa Rosa, N.M., and was apparently unaware of that until he got there and had to purchase a ticket to Santa Rosa, Calif.
I also specifically remember one day on the way home from feeding the cattle a few miles away, it snowed so much that both trucks got stalled in the snowdrifts: my grandfather, my father, my cousin and me. We had to walk through the snow more than two miles home. My cousin led, my father followed with me behind him, and my grandfather last. Cousin Bruce broke a trail, and we followed single file. Nobody talked. I always wondered later in life what my cousin was thinking about trudging through the snow as he had done at the Battle of the Bulge. I never asked him. We just walked until we got there, and my grandfather never missed a step.
Failing health finally forced my grandfather into another form of his retirement, which involved more sitting than doing. Still he tended our garden for as long as he could get around and provided many vegetables. And he gathered a bunch of peach seeds and carved out the upper half, cleaned out the inside of the seed so it looked like a miniature basket and polished it up to give them to his grandchildren and other people. I still have the one he gave me. It was only at the last, when he really wasn’t well, that he sat down in a chair and wasted away, a blank look on his face day after day until he died.
Loren Tate and my grandfather are only a couple of people who decided to keep on keepin’ on their life’s work in retirement years. That’s great way to live.