When it comes to retirement, listen to your ‘Inner Chuck’

The story of a 75-year-old airport limo driver, who embodies the spirit of the American Dream, puts work and life in their proper perspective.

John B. Pinto

The most fortunate of us get to meet at least one guy like Chuck Harris of Lansing, Mich., in a lifetime. Chuck is 75 but passes for 60. He founded and owns the local airport limousine service and drives one of his cars on most days. His wife of 52 years, Verneice, keeps the books.

We recently met at the airport on a snowy Lansing evening for a short ride to a client meeting. But in that short trip, I was reminded of one of the most important lessons for every worker — and certainly every ophthalmologist — in America: Do not quit. Not ever.

Chuck’s beginnings

Chuck was born June 7, 1932, on a family farm in Rocky Mount, N.C., one of 10 kids, in the depths of the Great Depression. He is part Cherokee Indian but is mostly pure-blooded American Dream.

Growing up, Chuck and his siblings always had a roof and food, but there was not much more.

“We were so poor that when my father gave me 25 cents to go play in town, I could only spend 20 cents,” he said. Everything else he wanted to do was too expensive, and besides, he wanted to save the nickel.

There were no toys for Christmas, just candy and oranges. “For us, big fun was riding the wagon 3 miles to the ice house and getting enough extra to make ice cream,” Chuck said.

After 4 years in the Marines, he moved north to attend Michigan State University and never returned to the South. With five grandkids in the vicinity, Grandpa Chuck is in Michigan to stay.

“What I learned seeing all the welfare dependency back in North Carolina is that the very worst thing that anyone can do is give you something for nothing,” Chuck said. “When I first got to Michigan, after living on the reservation, I saw that the way all the paleface people made money was to work hard every day.

“It wasn’t like on the reservation, where you worked for 3 months and then collected welfare — ‘rocking chair money’ — for 3 months. These folks in Michigan worked hard. So that’s what I did, too,” he said.

Chuck’s first career was launched in the summer before college started. He took a short meat-cutting course in Toledo, Ohio, and applied for a job as a butcher. “The man at Kroger’s asked if I had any experience. I told him I had been cutting up meat on the farm since I was a little kid,” he said. “I guess I stretched the truth a little bit. I didn’t tell him it was mostly with a knife and fork.”

Chuck’s career as an entrepreneur

“In 1965, I bought my first business, Joe’s FoodLand in Okemos, Michigan, for $30,000. I only had $2,000 to my name and needed $6,000 to close the deal,” Chuck said. “My wife said it would never work out, but she stayed, and we’ve worked side-by-side for the last 42 years. I went to the milk company, one of our vendors, and they gave me part of the money.”

He scoured around for the rest of the seed capital he needed. “My insurance agent from New York Life learned I needed another $2,000 to get started,” he said. “He pulled out his checkbook and provided the rest of the funds on the spot. We took the final inventory, signed papers and I was the new owner.

“One cash register on that first day had $50, and one had $25. The first person to come in was the delivery guy from Shaffer Breads. After I paid for his c.o.d. order, I had just $1 left to my name. I had overlooked the fact that you need working capital to run a business,” Chuck said.

Fortunately, more customers than deliverymen came in that day and he kept his head above water.

Small-town grocery store hours are long, compared with the hours you probably work in your practice. Chuck worked from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, which is 85 hours a week. Once, when he needed to paint his house, Chuck worked through the night until that job was done, too. “It was 3 years that went by like that before we took our first vacation,” he said.

There were the usual ups and down. “We bought the building. A competing market, 3-blocks-wide, came to town and competed with us,” Chuck said. “We specialized in Iowa beef and aged it in our own meat plant and locker. The town flooded. Then fire burned the store down, and we only got $65,000 from the insurance company. Folks in town had a benefit for us. They even closed the street and held a carnival to help us get started again. The man from the local Kiwanis Club gave us a check for $4,997 to stay in town.

“We built a new store and beat our sales projections, despite the growing competition. Then we bought another store in Lansing and then another. At peak, we owned four stores, five houses and two apartment buildings,” he said.

An abrupt ending and a new start

Chuck retired abruptly 20 years ago, largely because he simply felt it was time. “We had plenty of money and didn’t need to work anymore. We traveled all over; took 9-week vacations, and I played lots of golf. I’ll tell you, if you play golf every day, it starts to become a job and then a chore and then it stops being fun,” he said.

Retirement did not last long.

“I woke up at 1 a.m. one morning at a local club when the bartender tapped me on the shoulder and said it was time to go home. … I had been there since 2 p.m. the previous day,” Chuck said.

He never could figure out how much whiskey he drank that evening. He quit the hard stuff on the spot and got back to work. “Just like that, I bought three cars and started the next company, Airport Chauffer Service,” he said.

Chuck has never been sick and never sees a doctor for anything more than annual checkups. Chuck was older than 60 before he needed reading glasses. His parents lived until their mid-90s. “My doctor says he’s glad he doesn’t have any more patients like me, or he’d go broke. I think it’s because I move around so fast that the germs can never catch up,” he said.

Chuck said he believes that your environment growing up forms your attitude for life. “Living poor is hard. Getting that first money is harder. Then it just kind of keeps coming if you’re willing to work. Now I’m like a cat chasing a mouse,” he said. “The paleface people taught me that you have to work and you have to save. I’m still pretty conservative. It’s really a thrill to save a couple of bucks. I still like to have enough in my pocket to buy anything I want.”

He recently took his extended family to Hawaii for a week. “My biggest thrill was to go on this vacation and pay $480 per night for just one room, when we used to pay a tenth of that for a full month’s rent. It proves to me that at last I’ve made it,” Chuck said. “But you always need another goal to keep pushing toward. That’s why I started this limo service. I get to talk to all kinds of people from all over the country. What else am I going to do, hang around with old people? No way. They complain too much.”

Opportunity knocks

If you are a middle-aged surgeon reading this, and perhaps starting to long for your own retirement, I hope you will soon meet someone like Chuck, who at 75 is still bigger than life and still working hard every day of the week. It is the best way to put work and retirement in their proper perspective:

• One key purpose of this life is to find something to do and to get good at it.
• The best kind of work is that which allows you to help others, whether you are putting food on their table, driving them around town or restoring their eyesight.
• The happiest and longest-lived people enjoy helping others so much that they never really think about quitting, even if in our society one is supposed to hang it all up at 65.
• The word “retirement” should perhaps be retired.

So even if you do not meet Chuck on the street the way I did, try to get in touch with your own “Inner Chuck.” Remember that opportunity is knocking every day, all the time. Most people hear the knocking and complain about the noise. Try to be like Chuck, who has loved getting up out of his easy chair and welcoming opportunity to come on in every time it knocks, for a lifetime.

For more information:

• John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. Mr. Pinto is the country’s most-published author on ophthalmology management topics. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement, Cashflow: The Practical Art of Earning More From Your Ophthalmology Practice, The Efficient Ophthalmologist: How to See More Patients, Provide Better Care and Prosper in an Era of Falling Fees and a new book, The Women of Ophthalmology. He can be reached at 619-223-2233; e-mail: pintoinc@aol.com; Web site: at www.pintoinc.com.