An Ideal Situation

I retired in June of 2016 and was pleasantly surprised to see that my retirement fund had grown nicely. There were plenty of discussions along the way with fellow employees at St. Lawrence as to the best way to manage the TIAA-CREF accounts that the University had as a pension plan.

If I have this right, TIAA is a more conservated bond-based fund, while CREF is stock market based. Athletic Trainer Art Van Auken urged me to go heavier on the TIAA side while professor John Hall said to go 75-25 in favor of the CREF side. I, through inactivity, stayed right in the middle 50-50 through my 40-years at St. Lawrence. I started at a little above $9000 per year in 1975 and finished at $59,000 in 2015. I had part of a year at $25,000 in 2016. At the end, and thanks in considerable part to financial advisor Brian Wilcox, my pension fund ended up near $900,000. By doing nothing, I had done it right.

Fortunately for me, I was not in sportwriting or the SID-business for the money. I needed/wanted enough to live on and in my younger years dealt with finance companies to get by. I had a pretty good record of paying things off and as the salary increased, things got a little easier. I earned $677 in 1966, the first year of my official Social Security earnings record when I worked as a part-time and summer worker for the St. Albans Messenger and Vermont Sunday News. My income jumped to $3500 my first year working full-time at the Free Press and was up to about $8500 when I left for St. Lawrence in July of 1975. Salaries increased, albeit slowly, year-by-year during my St. Lawrence career and finally cracked the $50,000 mark in 2008.

A $50,000 or $60,000 salary sounds pretty good, but I should point out that 70-hour weeks were the norm in sports information, not just by me, but by sports information directors everywhere. It is a notoriously underpaid and overworked profession, and young people are bailing out of it regularly citing the low pay and high expectations. It was, however, something I really enjoyed doing for the most part and brought gratification in dealing with student-athletes, their parents and a great coaching staff at SLU.

All of this money talk, brings me to my current ideal living situation. Since I retired, I spend nine months in the North Country and three months in Florida. The first three years of retirement I spent about $10,000 on a two-week all-inclusive trip the first two weeks of February to somewhere in the Caribbean. I went to St. Martins the first year, Jamacia in year two and Punta Cana in year three. I had a great time on all three trips, but I had to endure winter until February before departure and put up with more winter and what is loosely described as spring after I returned. In one of those light-bulb moments in 2019 I decided I was better off renting a place in Florida for three months for about the same amount as I was spending on the Caribbean trips. My first three years, January through March was spent in Cape Coral on the west coast, right next to Fort Myers. The weather was great, the traffic terrible and I made a lot of new friends both on the golf course, in the condo complexes and at the Lobster Lady which turned out to be my go-to bar and restaurant and fresh seafood provider in Cape Coral. I made frequent trips to play golf with Ron Waske and his group of friends in Fort Myers…a group that included NHL Hall of Fame broadcaster Jiggs McDonald who still broadcasts the occasional NHL game and was with the Islanders when Waske was the team athletic trainer. Jiggs makes the third Foster Hewitt Memorial Award winner that I know. Brian McFarlane, a record-setting scorer at St. Lawrence in the 1950s and inducted for his work on Hockey Night in Canada and Dan Rousanowsky, who I worked with on Saint radio broadcasts and is now with the San Jose Sharks are both on that list as well.

I wanted to go back to Cape Coral again in 2023, but my realtor couldn’t come up with anything in my price range. The rents went steadily up for three-month stays and the best they could do was well over $20,000, and I think that was a moored sailboat! My buddy RB suggested I take a look at New Smyrna Beach. It might not be as warm in January as Cape Coral, but the traffic for the most part is less and there are a bunch of Canton folks who are in town at various points in the winter. I found a nice condo on the beach on A1A and while January was damp and cool, enjoyed a great stay and played a lot of golf.  RB called me partway through that stay and said he was losing his tenant in his condo and wanted to know if I would be interested in staying there this winter. I couldn’t get the check to him fast enough. It is a place I have visited a number of times and is perfect for my needs. I am enjoying just looking at the clear blue skies while we go through a cold snap early in the stay, but the 14-day forecast shows more days in the mid-to-upper 60s than in the 50s coming up.

The other nine months of the year, I now dwell in Vermont. I am in an apartment in my sister Jenny’s house and have herself and her husband Jim Hubbard to watch over me. Jen has been great as I start this whole leukemia thing and Jimmy has gone out of his way to help me out. He has been my fish-tender (I have a 30-gallon aquarium with four rather large angel fish, eight black skirt hi fin tetras and a seldom seen, but very active yellow algae eater) while I am gone and sometimes while I am home. He has a touch for the water that keeps it clearer than I can, so I can declare him part-proprietor of my fish tank.

I grew up in St. Albans and now live in Swanton and when I was in St. Albans in the summer on vacation from St. Lawrence I played golf at the Champlain Country Club. Since I have returned it is my favorite place to go and even when I was unable to play this past summer because of my back issues, I was a regular at 3:30 or so in the afternoon at the bar. I am looking forward to a return this summer…it may be late May or June depending upon what happens in the treatment plan down the road, but I will be back out there at some point.