Good times Retirees discover life beyond Rutgers Archived article from Apr 28, 2000 By Douglas Frank   Rummage Inc. "We just had a sale in March, we're going to have a flea market in May, we sell art in June, sometimes a furniture sale in November and a book sale in December. We sell different things at different points throughout the year," says Reginald Bishop in describing "Rummage Industries Inc.," his pet name for the popular sales at Trinity Episcopal Church in Princeton. For the past 12 years, Bishop has been the self-appointed "chairman of rummage and its disposition." He took the job over from his wife, who ran it for two years. "It kept getting bigger and bigger, and we couldn't get anybody to take over. I>®¹(  > )uch of the community looks to us to get rid of their stuff. All of the proceeds go to the needy of Trenton and Princeton and environs." The sales are a win-win situation in several ways, says Bishop, who served Rutgers College for 40 years as a professor of French, including 20 years as dean of instruction, before his retirement in 1992. Proceeds of the sales help support a counseling service and crisis ministry that Trinity runs along with the Presbyterians. The church also sponsors a soup kitchen in Trenton. "The great thing about it is that there is a genuine area of community service in helping people to recycle things that still have some life in them and in other people getting something they need at a good price," Bishop observes. "There is also the ecological advantage of recycling things back into use and helping the poor in the process." One of the advantages to the church, he says, is that "a lot of people in the church get to know each other from the interaction of preparing and running the sales." Some 200 people work on the sales during the course of the year. "It takes a lot of planning and a lot of work," he adds. "I can put in 14 eight-hour days in the two weeks before a sale, getting the items sorted and planning their movement. It's almost a full-time job." Once a writer John Williams was always a writer, it seems, making notes for his memoirs when he was just a kid, publishing 12 novels and editing or co-editing 20 or more books and articles while he was a professor of English. After retirement, he dusted off an unpublished novel, began writing a new one and worked on his memoirs. Williams, the first Paul Robeson Professor of English on the Newark campus, who retired in 1994 after teaching there for 15 years, recalls that he has always found time to write and that now his life is "writing, writing, writing," he says with emphasis. "I don't know where all the time is going. At the end of the day, I wonder what I've accomplished, but in the end it all adds up." Writing is both his profession and avocation, he acknowledges, and sometimes "it's something like a compulsion." His daily regimen is pretty strict, but also includes time for relaxation. "I have breakfast, and if there are no errands or doctor appointments, I go to the study and work until noontime. After lunch, if the weather's nice, my wife and I may take a walk around town (Teaneck). Then I'll work until 5 and have a glass of wine and dinner and go back after the national news for an hour and finish up things for the day." He says the secret to producing novels is making yourself write. "You have to say, 'I'm going to sit down, write it and finish it,' " he maintains. Williams is reluctant to discuss the novels under way. But he is not shy about telling about the libretto he wrote in 1995 that was premiered last October by the Opera Company of Columbus, Ohio. Titled "Vanqui," after the heroine, the story starts in the 1700s when two slaves are killed. The dead man and woman, once lovers, search for each other, meeting historical figures along the way. They finally find one another on the eve of the Civil War. The music is by composer Leslie Burrs. When he first retired, Williams did as many as a dozen speaking engagements a year but has cut that number to just a few. "They're not as much fun as they used to be," he admits. In all, he is enjoying retirement but wishes the days were a little bit longer. "Just tell them I'm staying out of the bad weather and writing," he adds. Art compulsion Norman Eiger remembers having a three-month "orgy of painting" in Camden, Maine, where he and his wife have a place. "Seascapes, landscapes, everything," he recalls. It was in the summer of 1994, and he had just retired as a professor of labor and industrial relations at Rutgers. "I had been painting on my left foot for so many years, and now I was painting on both feet," says Eiger in describing the feeling of being free to paint after years of doing it part time. His deep interest in art goes back to his days at the High School of Music and Art in New York City, and continued when, as a young union organizer, he lettered picket signs and posters, did layouts for newspapers and drew cartoons. He is now a regular in the Princeton art scene, meeting with a group sponsored by the Princeton Art Association that does figure drawing and also gathering with friends to sketch. "I'm accumulating hundreds of drawings of figures of all types -- pen and ink, brush, graphite and charcoal. But most of my paintings are watercolors and acrylics, and the figures don't seem to enter my paintings." He has shown his paintings, including a large show in Princeton four years ago. "One of the delights of my retirement," he says, "is that I made the right decision in volunteering to become a docent at the Princeton Art Museum. It's volunteer, but it's a lot of hours, I'll tell you. "The main thing we do is give tours or talks at the museum on some part of the collection. Most of the time we get advance notice, but once I got a frantic call for someone to talk to a group on Abstract Expressionism. I quickly ran down and gave them some insights into the subject." The 50 or so volunteer docents have to be versed in the variety of art styles that are represented in the museum's collection, including Chinese calligraphy, Mesoamerican works, and Western art from Greek and Roman times through the Renaissance to the contemporary scene. "After six years, I've become familiar with every part of that collection," he says. Family historian When Jean Sidar retired in 1989 as vice president and secretary of the university, she segued into the presidency of the Douglass Associate Alumnae, in effect postponing departure from Rutgers for a while. "It was a fairly big job," recalls the 1943 alumna, "and I told them at my age I'm not going to be eligible for re-election." She left after three years in the post, but she didn't go off somewhere and just watch the rest of the world go by. Most people remember Sidar in connection with the 17 years she spent as a Rutgers administrator, but others recall that she also taught history at the college level, including four years at Douglass College part time, before she joined the administration. It is as a historian that she spent a good deal of her time in her early retirement, preparing genealogies of her own family and that of her husband, Al, also a former Rutgers administrator. The project looks beyond the personal side to explore the culture and context within which the families' stories unfolded. "I'm interested in the personal side of genealogy -- so and so married so and so and had x children -- but, as a historian, I am also interested in the history surrounding the family -- where they came from, what the situation was like." She had a lot of information about her own family, but not about Al's. Her husband's father came from Lithuania and his mother from Croatia. "When they came here they wanted to put aside Europe and become Americans, so they didn't talk much about it," she says. "So I started with Croatia and finished it and almost finished Lithuania. These are short histories so the family will know the history of where they came from," she adds. Since her retirement, she has also been a very active member of both the Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church and Fellowship Village in Liberty Corner, a continual-care retirement community, where she serves on the board and on the library committee. She is a member of her church's pastor nominating committee, participates in a weekly fellowship group and lectures on such topics as the Reformation. She has been active in a book discussion group and is taking up duplicate bridge, an old favorite, again. She follows the Rutgers women's basketball team, has season tickets and sees most, if not all, of the games. Sidar stopped the genealogy work after her husband passed away but hopes soon to pursue her own family; some landed with the Puritans in Massachusetts in the 1630s, and others -- her Scotch-Irish ancestors -- came over 100 years later and settled in the South. She has one fascinating ancestor: Martha Carrier, hanged as a witch in Salem. "I'm a direct descendant of this poor woman," she says. On the beach Since retiring from Rutgers-Camden in July 1998, after 34 years of service to the campus, former Professor of Public Administration Jay Sigler has been anything but inactive. These days, this full-time resident of Martha's Vineyard stays busy by working with two environmental groups on the island. The first, Senior Environmental Corps, is an AmeriCorps for the over-60 crowd -- the "old gaffer" group, he says, open only to retired people. The corps focuses on environmental education for the community, especially school kids. The work includes water testing and radon testing. "We're currently testing all the fresh water, and there's a lot of it on Martha's Vineyard. Nobody else does that," he points out. The other organization, Trustees of Reservations, works to keep the island as unspoiled as possible, despite pressures from developers and tourists. It owns several properties, two of them beaches. The private organization was the first to buy land to keep it from development. So summers find Sigler -- that's "Ranger Sigler"-- on East Beach, protecting rare wildlife, answering questions and making sure people stay on designated trails. Other than those pesky greenhead flies and the need to reapply sunscreen, he finds it a good life. He works in the area of the bridge where the Kennedy/Kopechne incident took place in 1969. More recently, a piece of the headrest from John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane washed up on his beach. "So I have to field those questions as well as the ecological questions." His job is being expanded this summer to include a natural area on the north side of the island, the highest point on Martha's Vineyard, where he will be the only guide for the 700-acre property. "Sure I miss Rutgers-Camden," he says, "but you don't have a beach."

For questions or comments about this site, contact Greg Trevor Last Updated: May 30, 2006 © 2013 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. All rights reserved.