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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