The Boomer Chronicles

Dan The Early Retired Man: Life Goes in Unexpected Directions

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 08:00 AM PDT

My cousin Dan, who retired in 2009 from the U.S. Postal Service at age 53, reminisces about the possible career paths he could have taken.

In honor of Father's Day, my son posted this picture on his Facebook page.

During my freshman year in college, my lab partner announced that he had earned his pilot's license. I made him an offer: take me flying and I will pay for the plane rental. On a beautiful Saturday morning we took off from Lakewood (NJ) airport in a two-seat Cessna 150. About halfway through the flight, he let me take the controls, I was hooked instantly. I started flight training within a few months, earning my private pilot's license, instrument, and multi-engine ratings. It was the mid-1970s and most commercial airliners had three pilots in the cockpit — the captain, first officer, and flight engineer. The job of the flight engineer was to monitor the plane's systems, the techie of the skies, and it was this job that intrigued me. I still needed my commercial and ATP ratings, which were very expensive and I was near-sighted, needing eyeglasses to legally fly (25 years later, an 18-minute procedure under a laser would give me perfect vision).

In my sophomore year, I was introduced to my first computer, a Digital Equipment Company PDP-8. It was the size of a refrigerator with flashing lights and big rocker switches on the front panel. You communicated with the PDP-8 with a teletype machine and you saved your programs on paper punch tape. I programmed the beast to simply type "hello" on that noisy teletype and I had the same feeling as when I first flew — hooked.

Had I succeeded despite my bad eyesight in obtaining my commercial and ATP pilot ratings, the story might have had a disastrous ending as technology completely eliminated the flight engineer position. Silicon chips now monitor all of the airplane's systems and even land the plane when the weather is at its worse. A recent survey asked pilots if they would like their children to become pilots, too. The answer was overwhelmingly NO. Sully Sullenberger, the hero of the Miracle on the Hudson, testified before Congress that his pay had been cut over 40 percent and his retirement was worth pennies on the dollar after US Air declared bankruptcy.

Instead I ended my 37-year career in a large data center, in charge of several thousand Windows-based servers, each hundreds of times more powerful than the PDP-8 and one tenth of its size. I was able to retire at the tender age of 53 with a pension and health care for life.

You just never know where life will take you.