Men Still at Work : Professionals over Sixty and on the Job (9781442222762) by Fideler Elizabeth F

Author:Fideler, Elizabeth F. [Fideler, Elizabeth F.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc
Published: 2014-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Septuagenarian Bob Schecter is a part-time, self-employed writer-for-hire whose business is called Bartleby Scriveners. While he enjoys the work and wants the income, he makes sure to leave time for volunteering, charitable projects, tennis, and Scottish dancing. He plans to keep working indefinitely.

PROFILE: ROBERT E. SCHECTER

Bob Schecter’s business is called Bartleby Scriveners, a reference to the title character in a short story by Herman Melville. He is by choice a part-time, self-employed writer-for-hire because (a) he enjoys it and (b) he wants the income. Bob writes books, articles, blogs, and newsletters for clients, some of whom are businesses and some are nonprofit organizations. One of his clients is the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), a research and educational organization that studies groups—often called “cults”—that practice harmful social and psychological manipulation and control. ICSA, originally named the American Family Foundation (AFF), was founded in 1979 in response to parents’ concerns that they were losing their children to organizations like the Unification Church. Bob helped establish and grow the foundation together with a Harvard psychiatrist, a personal friend, who had earlier published a report on the phenomenon in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Bob became AFF/ICSA’s director of publications. By 1990, however, the nonprofit was unable to raise enough money to support its small staff—even though the psychiatrist was always unpaid. That’s when Bob, who continues to abstract world press reports on “high demand” groups for ICSA, started Bartleby Scriveners.

It was not his first career change, however. Bob had spent several years (1967–72) at the University of Zambia Institute for Social and Economic Research in Lusaka studying the oral traditions of a small kingdom in Zambia. He earned a doctorate in African history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976 and went on to teach African history for a few years at two different universities. He left teaching because he did not really enjoy it, yet he remained keenly interested in Zambia and the friends he had made there.

Now seventy-one, Bob aims to write a book a year. With three books about business topics under his belt, he is now working on one about Massachusetts and the Civil War for the Massachusetts chapter of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, an organization formed by Union Army officers in the wake of President Lincoln’s assassination. “I am doing profiles of the ancestors of the present members who served as officers in the Union forces, as well as of noted general officers from Massachusetts. I will also include people and industries from Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire that contributed to the war effort.”

Fully half of each week is taken up by volunteering in the Framingham, Massachusetts, area where Bob and his wife, Mary Louise, reside. Bob is very active in the local Rotary Club, one of more than 34,000 Rotary Clubs worldwide whose members—1.2 million strong—are business and professional people committed to volunteer service at home and abroad. Bob has built support for a middle school computer literacy project in Zambia that became one of Framingham Rotary’s projects.

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