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Jean Coyle knows it's ironic that long ago, she taught college classes about retirement planning. As a tenured professor at universities in Illinois and New Mexico, she lectured on gerontology, age discrimination and women's issues. When she was 52, she made a life-changing move, entering the seminary and leaving with two masters' degrees. In 2002, she was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. As an associate pastor at a Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C., Coyle did crisis work, visiting homes and hospitals, counseling and preaching, conducting funerals. She expected a long career but in 2007, she lost her job in a church budget cut. At 62, Coyle -- who holds five degrees -- thought she had much to offer. She applied to hundreds of churches and organizations around the country. "I don't know if I was really naive or not, idealistic or not," she says. "I just believed I was supposed to be doing this and something would happen. There would be an opportunity." She hoped her past dealing with the sick and dying would prove especially valuable. "I think you might find a 26-year-old seminary graduate with that experience but not often," she says. "Churches say,
'We want someone who's going to be there 20 years.'" Coyle found a temporary staff job with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) but after three years of looking for a pastoral position, she reluctantly retired in 2010. "I'm literally sitting in the midst of job search files that I'm finally throwing away," she says, from her home in Washington's Virginia suburbs. "I know I'm never going to be interviewed again. This is a major thing for me. It's hard to say. I'm a type-A person. I love working. I want to work until I drop and collapse at my desk. That wasn't meant to be. It's very painful, very difficult. ... The positive part is to be able to say I'm retired rather than I'm unemployed. But people often turn away and say,
'Oh you're retired.' You feel discarded. You feel invisible." Coyle stays busy by filling in for pastors when they're on vacation or ill and participates in 13 volunteer activities
-- everything from pet therapy to neighborhood watch to usher at a college theater. "I always used to tell my gerontology students," she says, "that the saddest thing in the world is to have the answers and no one is asking you the questions anymore." ___ Ted Casper figured the path to a paycheck would pass through the classroom. When he was laid off at a semitrailer plant in southern Wisconsin in spring 2009, he initially thought he'd rebound quickly. He was a skilled tool-and-die maker and had never been unemployed for more than a few days. "I thought I'd spend a week filling out applications," Casper says, "and I'd spend my next week deciding which of the three or four jobs I would take." He soon discovered he had misjudged. "It was a real eye-opening experience," he says. "I started looking for work and no one was looking back." It wasn't just that he had no prospects. His wife, Gail, who has diabetes and Addison's disease, a hormonal disorder, had already lost her job at an auto dealership. And they were in the final stages of foreclosure, no longer able to make their $900 monthly mortgage payments. Their annual income had plummeted from $90,000-$100,000 to about $23,000
-- mostly his unemployment checks. Casper, then in his late 50s, followed a familiar route for unemployed blue-collar workers. He returned to school, enrolling at Blackhawk Technical College in Janesville, Wis. Two years later, he had an associate degree in industrial engineering technology. But he was 60, and competition was fierce
-- and younger -- with thousands of unemployed factory workers in the area, many from a recently shuttered General Motors plant. "I got zero responses," says Casper, of Edgerton, Wis. "I literally didn't even get the form letter that goes along with the
'thank you but no thanks.'" So last summer, Casper returned to Blackhawk to study business management. "I kind of accepted the fact there's no employer out there that will hire me," he says wearily. He'd like to start a business
-- making furniture is a possibility. Casper is philosophical about his fate. "There are times when you realize a lot of this is my fault," he says. "There were times when I was working and wasn't saving. ... On one level, it feels like someone should be taking care of me. On the other level, I feel I should have been doing it on my own." He just received his first Social Security check, but still hopes for another career. "If you can't find a job," he says, "maybe you've got to go out and create one. ... There's always something ahead. You just have to reach out for it." ___ Dennis Hansen sometimes wonders whether all his schooling was worth it. An aquatics biologist, Hansen has taught college, had his research published in scientific journals and spoken at conferences from New York to Hawaii, but in recent years, he's bounced from no job to a temporary job to taking any job for a paycheck. In late 2009, the Duluth, Minn., lab where he worked as operations manager, testing the toxicity of chemicals (and the impact on fish and water), closed because of declining business. Much of its work had come from Department of Defense contracts. After a year without work, Hansen, 32, was hired to monitor Lake Michigan and Lake Superior water for the state and federal governments over two summers. He also had short stints as a census worker and as an extra post office hand during one holiday crush. It hasn't been enough: Hansen says he has a $13,000 credit card debt and that's just for basics
-- his $600 monthly mortgage, heat and food. "It's definitely a roller coaster," Hansen says, with the ups coming when he's done well in a job interview and the downs when there's a rejection: "That's when I'm frustrated, angry and wondering why I went to college for 10 years." Hansen is resourceful and versatile: In college, he stocked grocery shelves, put motors in yachts and worked as a valet. Since 2009, he's applied for everything from oil field worker in Williston, N.D., to chemist in Iraq for a government contractor. "The more money they offer," he says, "the farther I am willing to go." Hansen says he never expected to be out of work so long, figuring his experience and research would make him a shoo-in for a job. In December, he had an interview but lost out to someone with a Ph.D. "I was beat out by someone even more overqualified than I was," he says. In January, another rejection. His marriage plans are on hold -- "I don't want to have a potluck welfare wedding," he says
-- and his joblessness casts a shadow over his relationship with his girlfriend. "We were watching the news when there was a report that the economy is getting better," he recalls. "She said,
'When is OUR economy going to get better?' That's just crushing for a guy." ___ In North Carolina, J.R. Childress spends Thursday nights at his group, Professionals in Transition, where the underemployed and the jobless meet to share tips, review resumes and support one another. Childress is casting a wide net in his job search and having learned to live on a quarter of his former salary, he says, if a new position offered "half or better, I'd consider that a bonus." He recently had promising news -- he was interviewed to be a contractor selling state license plates. "You hope that just around the next corner or the next person you talk to is going to have something," he says. "I pray. I say show me the way. ... But you're no longer planning ahead. You're planning to get through the next day." ___ Online: Professionals in Transition: http://www.jobsearching.org/
[Associated
Press;
Sharon Cohen is a national writer for The Associated Press, based in Chicago. She can be reached at
features@ap.org.
Copyright 2012 The Associated
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