SECOND ACTS IN AMERICAN LIVES

ALONG in his 40s, the American male often plunges into strange fits of black depression. He wakes in a sweat at 4 a.m. He stares at the dim ceiling. His once bright ambitions creep past like beaten soldiers. Face it: he will never run the company, write the novel, make the million. He feels fat and futile; his kids are taller than he is.

He ponders some escape. After all, Sherwood Anderson was 36 when he quit running an Ohio paint factory and started writing fiction. Gauguin was a sometime Parisian broker of 43 when he ran off to paint and wench in Tahiti. Should he dye his hair, have an affair, get divorced, quit his job? But how can he sacrifice that pension, that company-paid insurance? What girl wants him? What new employer?

Quite a few of these American males are suffering from what Sociologist Leon Bramson calls the "Charley Gray syndrome," after the hero of John Marquand's novel Point of No Return. Having finally won his bank vice-presidency, Gray finds it meaningless--and far worse, he has no alternatives. As Sociologist Bramson sees it: "We have made it virtually impossible for people to try different kinds of careers in middle life without extraordinary risks." With depressing finality, Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald declared: "There are no second acts in American lives."

Scott may have been right in his time. But no more. Now a noteworthy and increasing number of Americans are beginning second acts with verve and purpose. Among them are some rather familiar figures: military men, policemen and firemen who reach retirement potential at a relatively early age and apply their knowledge and skill to some new endeavor. They are being joined by a growing number of second-acters who are buoyed by an unprecedented level of savings from good salaries, by the rewards of profit-sharing plans and stock options, by early-retirement programs and by plain guts. They want to do a new thing and they have the means--material and spiritual--to do it.

Temporary or Total

For some a temporary change is enough. And for them the Peace Corps is one route. At 34, Lawyer Richard Enslen left his thriving practice in Kalamazoo, Mich., to head 150 other volunteers in Costa Rica. His wife stoutly enrolled their five children in native schools, went to a missionary clinic to have their sixth. Enslen says that "such service whets your appetite for more." Kalamazoo agrees: last fall the voters elected Enslen in absentia to a municipal judgeship that he has since returned to fill.

All-out apostles of self-renewal often go back to school to retool their skills. At 43, Los Angeles Aerospace Engineer Leon Elder wants a master's degree in management; last spring he budgeted $12,000 a year in savings to support his family, quit his job and enrolled full time at U.C.L.A. Elder happily matches report cards with his children ("A great way to bridge the generation gap"), foresees a higher-paid business future--or he may teach.

In 1953, Airline Pilot Ernest K. Gann, then 42, quit the cockpit for full-time writing (The High and The Mighty, Fate Is the Hunter), now lives a bucolic existence on one of Puget Sound's San Juan Islands and feels sorry for airline pilots who spend all their working lives at it. Gann is now determined to quit writing and try painting, mainly because he loves the challenge of tackling a new subject that he knows nothing about. "It's fear that makes us old," he says. "In a new career, you don't know what to be afraid of. You're young again, creative, alive."

Second-acters sometimes turn avocations into vocations. In the 1929 crash, Songwriter Sam Coslow lost almost $150,000, vowed to master the stock market and get it back. He did, while publishing more than 500 songs (Cocktails for Two, Just One More Chance). When rock 'n' roll arrived, Coslow recoiled, switched from music to the market in 1961 at the age of 55. He now runs an investment service, edits the well-known market letter Indicator Digest, grosses $3,000,000 a year--plus $80,000 in song royalties. "The important thing," he says, "is to know the second field and not go off half-cocked."

Five years ago, Fletcher Waller was toiling 14 hours a day as a Bell & Howell vice president in Chicago. "I loved sailing," he says, but he could never get his boat out. So, at 52, he quit his job and started his own business--renting boats and teaching sailing to overworked executives. Waller's income is now less than his former income tax, but he laughs at Who's Who for dropping him, extolls the magic effect on his marriage. "Why," he says, "we fell in love."

A year ago, Dr. Leon Kruger was just about the most sought-after pediatrician in the prosperous Boston suburb of Newton. At 46, Kruger earned $50,000 a year, sent his children to some of the nation's finest suburban public schools, owned a ten-room house filled with costly art objects. But he felt that he should be treating poor instead of rich patients. Now Kruger has quit Newton, moved to the Mississippi Delta hamlet of Mound Bayou (pop. 1,354), where he runs a federally financed clinic for impoverished Negroes, some of them literally starving. The move cost Kruger $15,000 of his own money, partly for the two trailers in which his family live on a muddy road at the edge of town. His wife earns $3,800 a year teaching remedial reading; as the only whites in the local schools, his children are learning things unheard of in Newton. For the first time, Kruger feels really needed: many of his patients have never before seen a doctor. He has already achieved his goal: "Service as a way of life."

Opening a Door

Any American who seeks self-renewal by serving others can almost certainly find a way today. Abroad, in addition to the Peace Corps, there are its private parallels, such as church organizations and the International Voluntary Services, which runs technical aid projects. The Manhattan-based International Executive Service Corps will send about 400 mostly retired executives abroad this year to help struggling foreign businesses. At home, the nation's troubled cities are begging for volunteer officials with almost any administrative skill. Assorted federal poverty programs also need help--the Job Corps, VISTA and others.

Beyond service, the U.S. has a serious shortage of skilled workers--a boon for self-renewers. Classified ads are crying for teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, journalists, machinists, mechanics, middle-management executives, physicists, policemen, toolmakers. The Forty Plus Club, a nonprofit organization, is placing jobless older executives in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and other cities. Ideas for institutionalizing self-renewal include business-backed social projects to stimulate jaded employees, Government matching grants for people returning to school, and former HEW Secretary John Gardner's proposal for "midcareer clinics," aimed at helping middle-agers make better plans up to and beyond retirement.

Just how discontented middle-agers should change their lives is obviously a case-by-case problem. But change they should--so say all successful second-acters. They grant that changing does not mean leaving all problems behind; they know that uncertainty and doubt can plague those who make a change. But merely choosing a new, meaningful goal is renewing; planning and taking orderly steps to reach it are highly stimulating experiences. And fear usually vanishes in the process. For a growing number of Americans, the result is the opening of a new door.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.