for some the way to escape
boredom (and earn extra $$) is to go to work....!!
At 78, Bonnie Rooks Likes a `Dirty Old Job' In an Ohio Steel
Mill --- Great-Grandmother Enjoys A Paycheck, Younger Pals; Paying a Child's
Mortgage
10 August 2005
The Wall Street Journal
MANSFIELD, Ohio -- As workers gathered inside a steel plant here to
congratulate a 65-year-old colleague on his retirement, Bonnie Lovellette Rooks
teased her co-worker about his decision.
"I'm sorry for you," joked the petite, wiry woman with a tough voice.
Ms. Rooks, who turns 79 next month, says she has no immediate plans to retire
from her job as a maintenance janitor at the AK Steel Holding Corp. plant.
The great-grandmother says she wants to keep working both for the money
and because she thinks she would get bored at home "looking at four walls every
day."
During a recent morning shift at the mill, Ms. Rooks dons coveralls, earplugs
and a hard hat with a protective face shield. Tugging a large red hose, she
sprays down equipment to prevent fires and product defects in the 20-ton,
red-hot steel slabs that pass through the massive rolling mill, sending sparks
and steel shards flying. A factory foreman, Ron Smith, says he worries about her
safety, but not about her "getting the job done."
Ms. Rooks likes to say that she is the oldest steelworker in the
country. A spokesman for the United Steelworkers of America says the union
believes that to be true. "How many people do you know who are my age and would
lay their life on the line every day to work in a steel mill?" Ms. Rooks asks a
visitor, as she puffs on a cigarette after work.
Many older seniors like Ms. Rooks are working well past traditional
retirement age, reflecting social and economic forces that have upended notions
of work and retirement. Many people reach retirement age without large enough
pensions or personal savings to provide for a comfortable passage into old age.
Some seniors worry, too, that their social lives will suffer if they quit their
jobs.
"Americans are not only living longer but also generally living healthier,"
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told an audience of economists and
academics in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last year. He suggested that encouraging people
to work longer would increase the nation's savings rate and take some of the
strain off the Social Security system.
Ms. Rooks owns her home and has $30,000 of savings after 22 years working in
the same factory. She doesn't have any benefits from a series of previous
factory jobs. And like many parents, she is supporting a grown child with
financial difficulties.
"As far as me retiring, I think about that," says Ms. Rooks. But it would
mean living on about 37% of her current income of $73,828, including $15,600 of
Social Security benefits. She figures those government payouts would remain
about $1,300 a month and she would get about $1,000 in monthly pension benefits
from AK Steel -- or a total of about $2,300 a month.
After increased post-retirement medical-insurance costs, she says she
wouldn't be able to afford the $1,000 or so that she spends every month to help
her younger daughter, Alesia Litteral, pay her mortgage and doctor bills.
"That's why I keep on working," says Ms. Rooks. "I won't be able to help once I
retire."
Ms. Litteral, 40, is a single, unemployed mother who worked in the mill for
21 years until she was disabled by an injury. "She's got her own house," says
her mother. "I can't stand by and watch her lose it." Ms. Rooks also buys band
equipment and school supplies for Ms. Litteral's 16-year-old son.
Ms. Rooks's older daughter, Jean Wrasse, 60, is a grandmother who operates an
auto-parts stamping machine at the nearby General Motors Corp. plant. Ms. Rooks
also had a son, Brent, who in 1985 at age 31 was killed by his wife. She claimed
she shot him in self-defense. When the woman was acquitted of murder charges,
Ms. Rooks led a successful effort to unseat the county prosecutor who handled
the case.
Ms. Rooks's daughters worry about their mother, who lives alone and drives
herself to work. Ms. Wrasse bought her mother a cellular phone and asked her to
check in frequently. "At her age, driving at night and going through rough
sections of town, I want to know basically where she is at," says Ms. Wrasse.
She also bought her mother a personal computer and taught her to play solitaire,
a diversion to keep her occupied when she isn't working in the mill.
Born in 1926 on a farm near Eldorado, Ill., Ms. Rooks grew up milking cows,
driving horses and shucking corn. Her parents were sharecroppers for a time,
moving from farm to farm. Ms. Rooks remembers her mother crying when she lost
her savings in a bank that folded during the Depression years.
Vowing never to be in such financial trouble, Ms. Rooks quit high school at
age 16 and moved to Evansville, Ind., to look for a job at a shipbuilder or auto
plant there. Considered too young for factory work, she waited on tables at a
Chinese restaurant. At 17, she married a Navy sailor and had her daughter, Jean.
The sailor eventually left and Ms. Rooks raised their daughter with help from
her parents.
Eventually, she answered a newspaper ad promising good pay and a free train
trip to Chicago. There, she worked at Brach's candy factory and met her second
husband, Hoyt. After he was laid off in 1951, the couple moved to Mansfield
where factory jobs were plentiful. Tire factories, pump builders and appliance
makers employed them both for years.
Driving around Mansfield recently, Ms. Rooks points out the sites of dozens
of closed factories. She worked at plants owned by Tappan Stove Co. and
Mansfield Tire & Rubber Co., which closed in the 1970s and 1980s. She and
Hoyt were divorced in 1972.
When she couldn't find another factory job, she completed several
state-funded training programs, learning to be a medical assistant and then a
welder. At one point, she managed a hair salon and taught at a beauty school.
But the pay was never as good as a factory job.
So, in 1981, unemployed at age 56, Ms. Rooks took a call from a recruiter who
asked if she wanted a "dirty old job" at AK Steel. She was one of a handful of
women hired to work on the track gang, replacing railroad ties. She later
graduated to the brick gang, lifting 100-pound bags of cement mortar, and she
broke bones when she fell while relining a blast furnace.
About a decade ago, she was reassigned to less demanding work as a janitor
inside the mill. She says it's still a difficult job, especially in the summer
when temperatures in the factory can reach 130 degrees. Two years ago, after she
nearly fainted from heat exhaustion while shoveling grease into buckets, she
started wearing a vest full of ice to cool her down.
Ms. Rooks says her work has kept her healthy despite her lifelong smoking
habit. She confides to a visitor that she is mulling the idea of retiring when
she turns 80 -- 13 months from now. By then, she hopes to have paid off Ms.
Litteral's mortgage.
But she worries about what she's going to do if she quits. "I'm lucky
I have a lot of young friends," she says. "But they are going to be working and
I don't know what I'm going to do with myself."
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