Baby Boomers Head For Clash With Age Bias Generation Of Middle-Aged Workers Not Likely To Give Up Without A Fight

At age 81, Joel McLendon works a 10-hour day. It starts at 7:30 a.m. in his company’s Dallas Trade Mart showroom and usually ends with a couple of hours at home poring over blueprints at the dining room table.

“I’m having too much fun to stop,” said McLendon, a man with piercing blue eyes, partially graying hair and erect posture.

McLendon Co., a 40-year-old firm now co-owned by McLendon and his son, represents about 90 manufacturers of cookware and gourmet food items. The senior McLendon heads a separate division that designs retail space for entrepreneurs who want to cash in on the gourmet cooking craze. He started the new design specialty when he was about 61. Since then, he has helped more than 400 stores nationwide get into the business.

While he’s still in the minority - the Labor Department says 12 percent of people over age 65 are employed - experts on aging and demographics expect the numbers of later-life workers to increase as the 76 million strong babyboom generation ages.

Better health and longer life have spurred a “second middle age” lasting from age 50 for 20 to 30 years, said Dr. Lydia Bronte. Although she never met McLendon, Bronte studied 150 people like him, whose careers remained active beyond age 65. About half hit career peaks after age 50, and 8 percent had their greatest achievements after 65. She reported her findings in “The Longevity Factor,” published by Harper Collins.

Next year, the first of the boomers will turn 50. Their entry into Bronte’s second middle age will continue for the next 18 years. (Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964.)

“The baby boomers are going to be the longest-lived, and the healthiest late in life, of any generation we’ve ever produced,” Bronte said during a recent Dallas visit. “They are not going to want to stop working early in life.”

That observation is at odds, of course, with what has been going on in corporate America for the past several years. Large companies have been shedding hundreds of thousands of employees - a disproportionate number of them aged 40 and over.

Bronte’s research suggests that corporate America is losing valuable human assets, since her subjects were highly productive contributors well into their later years. She expects a clash as baby boomers who want to continue working meet corporate age bias head-on. As a result, she expects that more middle-aged people will need to choose independent careers later in life.

Self-reliance is the trait that bolstered her research subjects. “All the people I interviewed had managed somehow or other to be relatively independent by the time they reached their 50s or 60s. That was what allowed them to continue doing what they did. They had all somehow managed to buffer themselves from the possibility that someone would say, ‘You’re 65. Out.”’

Another common thread was the need to take on new creative challenges. Some of the group were able to do that through careers like scientific research, law and art that change as they developed and changed. Others - like Julia Child, who published her first book on French cooking at age 50 - seemed to be rehearsing in early life for their true careers. Others took on new careers after they retired and got bored.