Buddy System

By Francine Russo

They were a tight-knit group, these friends from Sands Point, N.Y. They had moved to the exclusive Long Island community in the late 1940s and early '50s. The husbands commuted to Manhattan; the wives raised the children, did volunteer work, played golf and tennis, and met every Friday for lunch at the Manhasset Yacht Club. They spent 40 New Year's Eves together. And then, about two years ago, when most were in their 80s, they all sold their houses and retired.

So, was that it? The end of the lunches, the shared holidays, the bonds of friendship? Not at all. The friends retired together. Within months of one another, they moved 16 strong to the Windrows in Princeton, N.J., an assisted-living community. There, as before, they regularly lunch and play tennis. The going is getting a little tougher. Two members have been widowed; one has Alzheimer's; two suffer from macular degeneration. Those who can't drive must depend on the others. Still, single or married, ill or well, everyone is included.

The "Long Island contingent," as some call them in Princeton, are harbingers of a ground swell in retirement strategies. "I'm turning 60," says University of Chicago psychologist Froma Walsh, "and I'm hearing it everywhere." What she's hearing are schemes, sometimes in the fantasy stage, sometimes more fully developed, for friends to stick together even after leaving their jobs and homes. No numbers exist on this trend; demographers can't track retirement castles in the air. But talk to people over 50, and almost all of them have heard it from a friend--if they're not sketching it out for themselves.

Some groups cherish the notion of buying a plot of land and building separate houses on it or buying and splitting up an apartment building. "I've talked about buying a grand old house to share with my husband and four other couples, along with one younger person to do the harder physical work," says Pauline Boss, 67, a family therapist at the University of Minnesota.

What is it about the current wave of retirees that makes them put this new premium on togetherness? These folks lived through the '60s together, bonded over political activism and experienced a sense of community. As they age, they want to be with peers who share their cultural references and values. Also, as jobs and marriages have wrenched them far from their hometowns and as the nuclear family has broken down, they have felt the loss of their original communities.

In putting friends first, the new-style retirees are also putting their own emotional needs front and center in their blueprints for later life. Some are learning from the mistakes of those who went before, who followed the siren lure of climate and amenities into a lonely paradise. In a mid-1990s study of 1,500 retirees from a FORTUNE 500 company who settled in the southeastern U.S., the participants answered overwhelmingly that they had not planned well enough for their emotional needs or how they would spend their time, reports gerontologist Marlene M. Rosenkoetter, dean of the school of nursing at the Medical College of Georgia.

Rosenkoetter identifies six areas in which emotional fulfillment is critical to a happy retirement: roles, relationships, self-esteem, support groups, life structure and use of time. Friendship, she notes, is an ingredient in all of them. And, observes gerontologist Rosemary Blieszner of Virginia Tech, a host of studies conducted in the past decade indicate retirees who enjoy a rich social life with family and friends tend to be healthier.

These relationships are especially valuable at a time when adult children move around a lot. "The children have their own lives," explains Helen Sih. "But friends have the same interests as you." Sih is one of a group of eight Chinese-American couples in their 70s and 80s who moved one by one in the 1990s from New York to Rossmoor, a retirement community in Walnut Creek, Calif. They all arrived from China in 1950, raised their children together and, for over 30 years, held monthly dances and played mah-jongg.

For Jane and Jim Kaplan, a retired real estate broker and an electronics-company owner, both in their 60s, the importance of friendship hit home when they were considering relocating from Wayne, N.J., to one of several locales with appealing climate and recreational opportunities. "When push came to shove and we really thought about it," Jane recalls, "we felt we should go somewhere where we had close friends." Two years ago, the couple moved to the Governor's Land near Williamsburg, Va., a residential community, to be near Ginger and Herb Knapp, friends since their student days at the College of William and Mary.

In reuniting with friends from their youth, they're like lots of folks their age. "As people approach 60," psychologist Walsh notes, "they want to connect with people who were important to them in early life. I just had a five-day weekend where I saw both my college roommates and also had dinner with an old boyfriend and his wife. I feel as if I'm knitting together fragments of my life."

Marc Freedman, author of Prime Time, a book about the aging of the baby-boom generation, predicts that retirement will look different for boomers. The first retirement communities in the early '60s responded to "a desire on the part of many older adults for a new sense of community in a society where age had become a stigma," he says. Today, he suggests, the impetus toward new forms of community has more to do with the extent to which people derived their identity and social connections from work. "Our research shows that what people miss more than anything else in later life is what they got from work: not only a sense of purpose but the relationships that came with it," he says. Freedman predicts that more people will look to second and third careers, in part to satisfy their social needs.

For some boomers who are still working, shared vacations can serve as scouting trips for a group retirement locale. Three couples in their early to mid-50s--Vicki and Steve Thomas, Mark and Joan Cooper, and Jerry and Marilyn Lawler--have a long-standing commitment to be together as they age. The six met in 1974, when they worked at Credit Union National, a trade association in Madison, Wis. For nearly 30 years, although they have been living in different states (most recently Connecticut, Maryland and Alabama), the couples--who have no children--have spent vacations and holidays together. They now devote their yearly vacations to checking out prospects for retirement. Their plan is to buy a parcel of land together. Each couple will have some acreage, and all will share a pool and tennis courts. They're focusing their search on coastal North or South Carolina. They want to settle near a university town with good medical and nursing facilities, and each of them plans to find meaningful work. "We've had our share of scars and arguments," observes Vicki Thomas, "and our friendship has stood the tests of time and relocation. Together, we became somebodies."

Alice Kethley and five close friends, all single, have blocked out a scheme for co-owning two houses--one in a warm climate, one in the Pacific Northwest--and residing part of the year in each. Kethley, 67, an administrator at the Benjamin Rose Institute in Cleveland, grew attached to her "secondary family" in the '70s, when they all lived in Eugene, Ore. Planning to retire next year, she recently bought a condo in Hawaii with space for three or four people. One friend has agreed to join her when he retires in five years. "The younger people [some 10 years younger] will come on vacations in the interim and may also join us to live," she explains. "The condo will help us decide whether we want a house in Hawaii. And if they don't come to my house," she jokes, "I'll just go and live in their house."

These determined bands of pals feel certain that they will accomplish some version of their grand design. The plans of others may never be realized or may have to adapt to changing circumstances. Still, says Walsh, "I think it's more than fantasy, and we are likely to see far more retirement options. Maybe they won't buy that plot of land, but they and their friends will check in together to the same Marriott assisted-living community." One way or another, the growing number of such communal visions in the 50-plus generation is bound to change what retirement looks like in the years to come.