NMH Magazine : Spring 2008

Reinvented Lives

by MARY SEYMOUR

Once upon a time, having a 40-year job capped off by a gold watch and a comfortable pension was considered a pretty good life.

Times have changed.

According to US Department of Labor statistics, the average person will change careers between four and six times in her or his lifetime.

A recent baby boomer poll called The New Retirement Survey indicates that 76 percent of boomers intend to keep working in retirement. On average they expect to retire from their current career at 64, then launch into an entirely new one. Why do they want to keep on working? Most are looking for mental stimulation and challenge rather than simply continued earnings.

Younger generations are chasing the same ideals—self- fulfillment, renewal, challenge—as they cycle through different careers. Anticipating long lives, they see ample opportunity for recasting their professional roles.

The NMH alumni on the following pages exemplify this trend toward career reinvention. Whether from the class of ’55 or ’86, they all share the same gusto for living fully and following their professional bliss.

 

The Cabbie and the Classroom
Svein Arber ‘55

The low watermark in Svein Arber ‘55’s professional life came in 1987, when his San Francisco restaurant-bookstore, the Bookplate, went into bankruptcy. What had been a winning business in the Marina District headed south after a Waldenbooks branch opened up across the street, insurance premiums tripled, and operating costs, including rent, skyrocketed.

The business languished in Chapter Eleven for two years until Arber, unable to come up with a viable recovery plan, moved on. “I closed my doors and began wondering what, at fifty-one, I could possibly do next,” he recalls. “Incidentally, during the time when my business was dying, my marriage also expired.”

The following months were among the most trying of his life. After a few short-lived gigs waiting tables, he became a cab driver, making enough to keep up with child support payments for his young daughter and to buy time to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. He’d already had three incarnations: army training specialist in Korea, New York book publishing executive, and his 11-year run as owner-manager of the Bookplate.

The answer to his occupational dilemma lay closer at hand than he realized. Arber thought back to the time when, as a student at NMH, he’d first dreamed of becoming a high school English teacher. “I learned to love literature at Mount Hermon, so much so that I developed a desire to make it a permanent part of my life,” he says. “The school also taught me that one gains nothing from feeling sorry for oneself. This gave me a reservoir of grit that I was able to draw upon at times when I might easily have given up the ghost.”

Armed with grit, his resurrected ambition, and the bachelor’s in English he’d earned at Cornell, he entered the program for secondary teachers at San Francisco State University. Earning his teaching credential and a master’s in literature while still driving a cab, he gradually reduced his shifts as teaching jobs came along.

“I pushed a hack for eight years, so I guess you can say that cab driving also qualifies as one of my careers. I never loved it, but I appreciated several of its aspects: freedom from direct supervision, the daily challenge to make my nut, and the luxury of walking away at the end of a shift with money in my pocket, free of any lingering work issues.”

After six years of part-time teaching, Arber received an offer to teach English at Lowell High School, the oldest public secondary school west of the Mississippi and San Francisco’s premier academic high school. He was 61 years old when he took the job; at 70 he became chair of the English department.

Arber teaches Advanced Placement Literature and a rolling roster of courses including Ninth-Grade English, the American Short Story, and Film as Literature. He’s also a part-time lecturer at San Francisco State, where he teaches sophomore composition.

What he loves best is getting teenagers to appreciate and write about literature. “When one of my classes gets into a lively discussion that triggers all manner of insightful contributions, I sometimes say to myself, ‘Am I lucky or what, getting paid to do this work?’”

Asked if he envisions more career shifts, he answers, “I have to believe four careers are plenty for one lifetime.” Then, with characteristic open-mindedness, he considers, “I probably wouldn’t be averse to trying something new when I retire from teaching, two to three years from now.”

After all, it’s never too late, as he’s learned over and over and over and over again.

 

Diving into the Unknown
Jay Garbose ’67

Sometimes change creeps up on you quietly. Sometimes it hits you front on. The tractor-trailer truck that slammed into Jay Garbose ’67’s car while he was driving to his West Palm Beach law office 19 years ago was definitely a case of the latter.

Hustled into surgery with a shattered knee, arm, and face, he had one question when the anesthesia wore off. “Can I still dive?”

He did not, as he now notes, ask, “Can I still practice law?” The doctors said anyone else in an accident of that magnitude would have died. What he’d been given, he realized, was a second chance in life.

Nowadays Garbose wears wetsuits instead of three-piece suits, and he’s happy—very happy. An underwater videographer since 2000, he’s living his second chance. Granted, the work doesn’t pay a heck of a lot—travel and equipment costs are sky-high, remuneration scant—but, oh, the places he goes: Australia, Mexico, Honduras, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Greece, California.

His footage has appeared on HBO, National Geographic specials, and network news. Diving with sharks is his favorite gig; he’s been out with tiger sharks, hammerheads, bull sharks, and lemon sharks, but he’s happiest mingling with great whites. He’s done it four times and would do it again in a heartbeat.

Garbose has become an Internet guru on underwater videography and digital video editing, and he’s written numerous dive-related articles. This February, when a tourist on a shark expedition off the Florida coast died from a shark bite, TV crews besieged Garbose as the go-to shark expert.

He experienced a fleeting frisson of fame in 2007 after happening upon a strange, sea serpent-like creature off the shores of Juno Beach. His footage of what he dubbed “the living intestine” aired in 32 countries and boosted his Google hits to 70,000. Experts at the Smithsonian rather sniffily concluded that he’d recorded a Nemertean worm. Garbose donated use of the film to the Vancouver Aquarium and was tickled by the feedback: “All the attendees were perfectly grossed out by it.”

Despite Garbose’s puckish grin and how-did-I-get-so- lucky air, there’s a tragic undercurrent to his story—one that adds complexity to his passion for water. In 1970 his younger brother, David ’68, drowned in the family’s pool. Garbose was on the scene and gave him artificial respiration, but it was too late. Haunted by his failure, he signed on as an orderly at George Washington University Hospital. “After talking to enough doctors and seeing enough trauma cases, I was convinced that I’d done everything I could have for my brother.”

In 1976 he headed for Florida, where he earned a law degree from Southeastern Nova University. Right after graduating, he started scuba diving and immediately became addicted. For the next 20 years, he practiced law as his vocation and diving as his avocation—until that head-on collision gave him a new set of priorities. Along the way he married Leigh, a high-end travel agent in Palm Beach, and tried to introduce her to the joys of diving. She failed to see the magic in it, but that didn’t stop him.

“The hardest thing about changing from law to diving has been my own health,” he says. “From my accident, I still have problems with my legs. Diving requires a lot of physical prowess, and the stamina end of it is hard.”

On the other end of the scale, he loves the idea of people appreciating his videography—especially children. “One of my goals is to inspire children, because they’re going to carry the torch as far as conservation goes on this planet.”

Garbose is involved with the Wild Dolphin Project and donates his services to shark research institutes and oceanographic foundations. “It was absolutely part of my schooling at Mount Hermon to give back to society,” he explains.

In return, he’s getting to do what he loves best. “I did like practicing law, but I got too involved and took things too personally protecting others’ rights. Communing with sharks is more relaxing.”

 

 

 

Exit Wall Street, Stage Left
Alex Beech ’86

In 2001, Alex Beech ’86 had an aha moment while working at Lehman Brothers in New York City. During three years at the investment bank, she’d risen from emerging markets analyst to marketing strategist to business manager. That day, sitting at her desk in front of three spreadsheets, she admitted to herself, “Wall Street isn’t for me.”

And so she quit to return to her real love: playwriting. She’d started writing plays in 1996 after meeting Cuban avant-garde playwright Maria Irene Fornes, whom she’d bonded with on a Mexican tour bus. With Fornes as her mentor and inspiration, Beech began to try her hand at the medium.

She enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA program and graduated in 2007 with four full-length plays to her credit. That year Beech’s play Breaking Walls: A Wall Street Romance was performed at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre to a sell-out audience.

Her Cherry Lane triumph led to an offer to join the writers group at Primary Stages Theater in New York, where she shares her plays-in-progress with five fellow playwrights, the theater’s artistic directors, and its literary manager. Beech, whose mother is Venezuelan, is also a member of the Hispanic Playwrights Lab at New York’s INTAR Theatre, one of the longest-running Latino theaters in the United States.

“Entering the theater world as an older playwright has been difficult,” she says. “I started in my thirties, which is ancient by theater standards. Another change has been the financial sacrifices. But trust me—it’s worth it! I wouldn’t trade a thousand Gucci bags for one day in the rehearsal space.”

Beech credits NMH for teaching her to ask questions and see the world in new ways—key elements of her plays. “The big question I always keep in mind is ‘What if?’ I always create the world as it could or should have been, or sometimes—painfully—as it was. I like being a journalist in the theater.”

In fact, she was a journalist in her first career, working as a business news anchor in Tampa, Florida, and a reporter-producer at Expansion Financeria (part of Televisa, the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world) in New York. During the latter stint, she interviewed Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro; as her credentials grew, she thought about jumping into mainstream media but accepted an offer from Lehman Brothers instead.

Lack of passion for spreadsheets wasn’t the only reason she left Lehman. “The bank was very homogenous and monochromatic, both ethnically and culturally. At one point the CEO let everyone wear business casual; I looked around and noticed that my coworkers were mainly Caucasian and male, and that they were wearing blue, button-down shirts and khaki pants. Intellectual curiosity didn’t abound.”

By comparison, playwriting is pure technicolor. “I love the theater audience because they sit in front of a play to learn, to grow. I want to honor them by writing plays that encourage discourse—and perhaps lead to a transformation.”

Beech, who sees the world through a spiritual lens (“I think I have six pairs of eyes; this serves me greatly as a writer”), is also passionate about political and human rights issues, especially in Latino countries. In the late ’90s she launched two websites to inform the world about Venezuela’s escalating economic and political crisis. Last year she was a project manager for The Sugar Babies, a film that shows how the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic exploits Haitian children.

Theater, however, is what she lives and breathes for. It’s not an easy path she’s chosen, yet she can’t imagine any other. “I had enough faith to believe that I could have an artistic career and support my needs, and, eventually, most of my wants,” she says of her dramatic career change. “Whether I was self-deluded is still in the air.”

 

 

More Career Changers

Compiled by John Snyder, Kate Snyder, and Mary Seymour

 

Math Versus Music
John Lawson ’55

As a sophomore at Yale, John Lawson ’55 couldn’t decide whether to major in music or math—so he dropped out and joined the army. After two years as a private first class, he went back to school to study engineering, then began a nearly 30-year career at Bell Laboratories, rising to department head. During that time he indulged his musical side by singing in various choruses and madrigal groups, finally settling at the New York Choral Society. When AT&T began downsizing in the early ’90s, Lawson, who was pension-eligible, left Bell Labs to become director of the New York Choral Society. As executive director, he produces multiple concerts a year, primarily in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, for the 150-member society. This summer the group will perform in the Olympic Cultural Festival in Beijing—a high point in this former engineer’s music career.

 

 

The Butterfly Effect
George ’83 and Kathy Miller ’84

Siblings George ’83 and Kathy Miller ’84 were well into their 30s and had changed careers once (he went from sportswriter and broadcaster to salesman and IT worker; she switched from counseling adolescents to working in sales) when they decided that a steady paycheck couldn’t make up for rough hours and a long commute. Besides, another opportunity was unfolding. In 2000, Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory opened in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. Built and owned by the Millers’ father, George Miller Sr. (an NMH employee from 1976 to 1984), the conservatory includes an 8,000-square-foot greenhouse that is home to more than 4,000 live butterflies. In 2003, Kathy started working in the gift shop and soon became general manager of the overall enterprise, while George signed on in 2004 as business manager. From flipping the occasional burger at the food court to helping with a butterfly hatching, their jobs are never dull. Says George, “Knowing that we’re offering an experience that lifts people’s cares is the real payoff.”

 

The Yogic Path
Debbie Eaton Peck ’63

Debbie Eaton Peck ’63 is starting what she calls her next life. Putting behind her four decades of desk work with the US government, she is in training in Herndon, Virginia, to become a certified yoga instructor for seniors. Peck says that after practicing yoga for 11 years with older people at work and in her church, she knew that yoga’s gifts were good for her. “Why not share such a pleasure with others?” she asks. When she finishes her yearlong studies, including more than 200 hours of class time, in September she’ll get to put her power into practice, with husband Ray and daughter Sarah (also a yoga practitioner) for support. The pair lives in Washington, DC, but Peck says she’s not sure where she will teach. She does know that her new career has its center at NMH, where “I learned that if I was passionate about something, it was what I should do, be it music, relationships, or yoga.”

 

From Lawyer to Rabbi
Van Lanckton ’60

The blow of a triple coronary bypass in 2001 sent Massachusetts lawyer Van Lanckton ’60 inward for some serious soul-searching. Grateful for his second chance at life, he hung up his law career and found a new path as a rabbi-in-training. His ordination will take place in 2009, when he’s 67. Lanckton’s legal credentials are solid: From 1967 to 2003 he directed a legal services clinic, was a teaching fellow at Harvard Law School, worked in state government, and practiced at two private law firms. But by and large it was only work, and Lanckton chafed at having to account for every minute of it. In 2003 he embraced a six-year program at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Newton that’s preparing him to anchor a synagogue of his own. In doing so he launched a career that he says has made him “intimately involved in people’s lives at times of great joy and at times of great sadness, and has helped others make meaning of these moments.”

 

 

Child’s Play
Dave Rockwell ’67

The children sent his way are the least likely prospects: those referred from state social service agencies, the courts, and special education programs. Many have urgent behavioral problems. Dave Rockwell ’67 makes it work. Rockwell, recently retired from 30 years in corporate America, is now a computer technology teacher at the Boston-based Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps, a residential treatment program for troubled youth. The work with his six-to-17-year-old charges, he says, is as exciting as the early years of his first career. “When I see the lightbulb go off in a little brain that finally gets networks or the client-server interaction, it is a thing of beauty.” Rockwell, a grandfather, also says he’ll stay at this as long as he is able and needed. “I want to start some after-school programs and parent outreach programs. I am trying to package everything I do so that it can be reused by others.”

 

Psychological Relief
Cheryl Chisholm ’63

Cheryl Chisholm ’63 is set to become the therapist she envisioned herself as decades ago, before taking side trips through publishing, scriptwriting, public relations, documentary filmmaking, and teaching. Now the Culver City, California, resident works full-time at a mental health agency for chronically mentally ill adults, is a teaching assistant in a graduate counseling program, and is in private practice under a licensed psychologist until she gets her own license later this year. Chisholm’s new career harkens back to her Harvard passions, where she immersed herself in anthropology and psychology. Attending seminars and workshops for her own growth in the ’90s inspired her to return to her first love. “For many years I truly loved my work in film, but I always knew it wasn’t the home I’d been looking for. Being a psychotherapist fits me in a way nothing else has. I love sitting in a room with other humans and using myself to help them heal.”

 

The Midlife Gastronomist
Maureen Hallock ’76

Maureen Hallock ’76 traces her passion for food to an NMH trip to Spain in 1975, where she fell in love with the country’s “fresh, honest cooking.” That experience stirred Hallock, but 30 years passed before she returned to the world of cuisine. During those decades she taught English and Spanish to elementary through high school students, and became a mother. In 2003 Hallock enrolled in a two-year culinary program in Connecticut, where she lives. She started Dragonfly Pantry in Westport, catering and creating homemade soups, marinades, fruit butters, and jams. Catering has revealed skills Hallock didn’t know she had. “When the food is flying fast, you have to make decisions—it’s taught me to be quicker on my feet.” But her career change may have a mellow end: her goal is to retire and open a “funky and laid-back” restaurant with her husband, Jim Hallock ’77, on Florida’s Sanibel Island.