I've decided to take time out and do three things in this essay. First, I intend to give my far-flung readers some very personal information about myself. I think it would be helpful for readers to know the rather unusual environment in which I work. Second, using that as a background, I am going to try to explain the amazing change that has occurred in my life since essay #1 was written 14 months ago. I sincerely hope that my experience will help others who will some day be 87 going on 88. Finally, I want to have a heart-to-heart "talk" with readers about how the flow of information between us may be improved.

MY RETIREMENT YEARS

I have given other glimpses into my life but what I want to do here is to concentrate on my retirement years. We do hear from retirees all around the globe but, for most of our readers, retirement is many years ahead.

My career as an essayist came very late in life. For all but the first four of my professional years I held supervisory positions and dictated thousands of pages of correspondence and reports. I retired in1980, bought my first computer in 1981, and learned to write software in the Basic language at a local Junior College. Using my program called MAGIC for Moving Average Generated Investment Criteria I started to write a monthly investment letter on mutual funds using data created by my software. Over the next 15 years I generated about 1000 pages of data and comments on a tight time schedule at the end of each month. Two of my old customers have sent e-mails asking "are the you the Bob Gordon who?" etc. We had a nice chat about old times via e-mail.

My health remained good until age 73 when I had 6 coronary bypasses. We moved to Sun City West shortly thereafter. It is a very fine adult community of more than 30 thousand aged 55 or over. At age 78 I experienced a near life-ending experience. My long battle with pollen and food allergies escalated into18 months of starvation, despite eating 6 huge carefully controlled meals per day. At the time I was on a wheat rotation diet, eating it only every 5 days. I ate a small piece of cake on a fifth day (I still remember it) and from that moment I was allergic to everything but water. I lost a third of my weight and never regained most of it. I have eaten no wheat for 9 years and still rotate all my foods in a very difficult regime.

That experience caused us to sign up for the planned retirement community Grandview Terrace where we have resided for the past five years. This fine facility has helped me live a fairly normal life and I'd like to give you some details below.

GROWING OLD IN AMERICA

My family experience until age 20 was in a 3-generation household consisting of two parents, two grandparents and 3 children. Multi-generation households were extremely common during the Great Depression and could certainly happen again in the coming one. After their children left, my parents lived alone in a large house until both were in their eighties. They had outlived all of their many friends, their physician, dentist etc. My mother had often said that she didn't want to live with a "lot of old people", thinking of the nursing homes of that time. Finally, with my mother in poor health, they moved from New York to Oregon to be near my sister at the same time my wife and I were moving from California to New York.

My wife and I might still be living alone in Sun City West, if we had not both had near-fatal illnesses. Fortunately, at the same time, Grandview Terrace opened a sales office in advance of its construction. Living in this magnificent 6-story complex with 288 condos and every possible facility for a full life style has been a joy from our move-in. But since then, despite our best efforts, we have never convinced any other couple to join us. The best we could do was to convince one widow and one widower to enjoy our great life style. Quite unbelievable, many couples delay entrance to the point where they are unable to enjoy all the activities. In other cases, the stress of moving in has caused some deaths to occur shortly after arrival.

Our neighbors in this friendly place range in age from the late sixties to early nineties. They have come from all over the U.S. A few were born abroad. The women outnumber the men by quite a margin. There is a broad range of education and background among the residents. There are more activities than any one person can possibly enjoy. We have five dining rooms each with its own decor to provide variety. We have an auditorium that can seat a 100-piece concert band and all our residents and their guests. We have two miles of carpeted corridors and never have to leave the air-conditioned premises when it is 115 degrees outside. We have banking, postal and beauty facilities in the building. We have facilities for hobbies, crafts, exercise etc. We have an extensive entertainment program both within our facility and elsewhere in the Phoenix area. All this is background for a problem that I will discuss next.

INTELLECTUAL COMPANIONSHIP

When my Dad retired from his life work as a top-notch tool design engineer, he spent another five years as a busy consultant to other industries in his city. Then he took up watch making as a hobby and it grew into another full-time second career. Eventually, bored with watches, he became attracted to very old clocks, hundreds of years old, which required hand made parts to repair. Soon people were bringing their clocks from 100 miles away. So my Dad had many work experiences with customers that provided a happy retirement. When I used to visit for a few days, the huge house was filled with chiming clocks in every room. He had a happy and full life until my mother's health required his around-the-clock attention.

When I entered Grandview Terrace in 1997, I gave talks on stock manias of the past but never attracted any serious interest. To this day, I have only about two people in this facility who are interested in discussing the economy and stock market and not at a very deep level. Unfortunately they are several years my senior and will probably predecease me. The only resident, now deceased, who had equivalent work experience was a retired former engineering vice-president at the Bell Laboratories. Until his death, he was my best intellectual companion. I had convinced him to switch from equity funds to bond funds prior to the market top. One convert out of 400 plus in five years is not a very good record. What it really means is that my friends and neighbors cannot be warned about what is now happening to their financial assets. They are living in their past memories.

Unlike my Dad, my skills were more intellectual than physical. My persistent questions in my third grade class so bothered the teacher that after one month she kicked me up to the 4th grade. Later someone decided I should skip the 6th grade entirely. So when I graduated from high school in 1931, near the bottom of the stock market, I had never cracked a school book in my life. I finally learned to study as a college freshman and almost won the award for the greatest improvement from the freshman to the sophomore year. As a senior I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa which helped me get a scholarship for my graduate work at MIT.

As I have reported earlier, my entire professional career was in doing and directing others to do things that had never been done before. Looking back, my greatest intellectual challenge was in developing and building the first nuclear reactor cores for our nuclear Navy and for the first central station nuclear power plant. I directed a large group of scientists, engineers and technicians in two complex Top Secret facilities. During this 1949 to 1957 time period, I worked very long hours under extreme pressure to meet an almost impossible schedule. I make this comparison now because in the past year I have been driven to work at least as long and hard on a completely self-imposed mission. This somewhat profound realization came to me only recently. Although completely different in goals, the intensive intellectual effort expended during these periods, five decades apart, now seem as being very similar. I feel qualified to make this judgment since my memory of the earlier period is quite clear. Two years ago I wrote a detailed memoir of those years, which is now preserved in the Nautilus Museum in Groton CT and several other Navy archives. That was the first major document I had produced since my doctoral thesis 60 years earlier.

My lovely bride of 60 years still worries about my health as she sees me pounding away with just time out for meals. She helps find the errors the spell checker cannot and enjoys reading some of my more interesting e-mails. I think she has finally realized that what I am doing is not shortening my life, but is increasing my desire to live and help others.

MY WRITING GOAL

My present goal is to write less and do it more effectively. That will require some better communication between my readers and me. What are some of the problems we must all work on? I am spending too much time worrying about two problems that I hope can be minimized:

1. Inadequate identification on the title line of my e-mails. I continue to request that readers put a recognizable essay name on their title line e.g. "Brilliant" for Brilliant Minds. I get a large number of junk and virus e-mails that I try and erase quickly so that I can concentrate on those from readers. This change requires little or no effort for readers and will be a big help.
   
2. I have yet to receive a really abusive e-mail. I do get expressions of differing opinions on certain issues that I read and value. This is good and as it should be. My biggest problem has been and continues to be long drawn-out letters that I cannot answer, usually of two types: (a) Requests for specific details on the names of stocks and funds to buy and (b) letters describing a personal money related problem that only the writer can solve, not me.
   

I realize that any new reader who is responding to a single essay may not have seen my frequent statements about subject (a). But I do resent repeated efforts by others to change my position as a special favor to them. I will say much more on this subject below. I also feel a need to write about subject (b), which although different, has similarities to (a).

ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN LIFE

I continue to be amazed and concerned about "adults" who think their lives or finances can somehow be improved by a few tips from an outside expert. My long held belief has been that the first task for any man or woman is to decide to manage their own life; to set the goals and make the basic decisions. Once that decision has been made, then advice from others can be helpful. In my essays, I am teaching the basic principles of how a portfolio should be set up and suggest what asset classes should be considered for the presumed market climate. This is the first and most important step for success in investing. Today we see the tragedy of tens of millions of investors whose life savings are in the wrong asset class. Our continuing message is so simple and yet so very profound.

Being in the right asset classes provides a great start, but investors need to do the selection of individual stocks and funds so that they can assume full responsibility for their portfolio. I see no other way they can ever become effective in handling their money. As I have tried to prove, using my own experience, you become a skilled investor by doing not reading.

I admit that, after 62 years of do-it-yourself investing, I am dismayed to see so many people who think that a tip from a friend or a magazine will be a real solution to their problems. One reader wrote that he needed the fund names because he was too busy to look them up. Well, I'm still willing to try and convince readers it is in their own best interest to make the final buy and sell decisions themselves. And, as this great bear market continues, I will continue to advise portfolios using a conservative, balanced approach. Once you have proved your ability to make money safely and surely that way, there will plenty of time and opportunity to be aggressive and assume more risk. That is the story of my life over the past 5 years. Using all my experience and the great tools now available, my assets are now more aggressively placed than at any other time in my life. It took nearly 60 years for me to reach this point but you can do it in five or ten. Move slowly and safely, and give it a good try.

FINAL WORDS

This essay was finally completed only after I had a big debate with myself about revealing some important details of my life to date. My decision was made, rightly or wrongly, to make my essays more meaningful to serious readers, to give them a glimpse of the person behind the words. These are the readers whose e-mails tell me about their own situation and life experiences. I can never reveal the wonderful stories that I read but I can assure you that my life has been changed dramatically by some of them. The old saying that "man does not live by bread alone" is still as true as ever.

The past year has changed my discouragement from inability to open lines of communication with my nearby friends and neighbors to a sense of tremendous joy from the flow of e-mails from around the world. My calendar age is increasing but my intellectual age is now younger than it has been in years. My brain is now working at a peak level; new ideas come at any time in the day or night. I usually am working on about 3 essays at the same time.

I sincerely hope that my old readers will understand why I finally decided to write this essay. I hope that your e-mails will continue to brighten my day and give me the incentive to continue writing. I trust that the details about the very different retirement lives of my father and myself will be of interest and possibly of value to you in your own planning.

To both old and new readers, please know that there is a real live person whose principle goal in life is to help makes yours a little better and easier. I turn my computer on very early each day and will be looking forward to hearing from you.

Robert B. Gordon Sc.D.
Sun City West AZ 85375
rgordon145@aol.com

October 11, 2002