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Retiree's new job: helping black youth

Katti Gray

March 17, 2008

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The morning of Jan. 2, two days into an earned retirement, Joan B. Johnson got out of bed at her usual hour, showered, dressed, fixed her makeup and, not discerning the right next move, had an odd feeling. A friend had forewarned of this. "Honey, I am bored to death," Johnson said the other day.

New Year's Eve 2007 had been her last day as Islip Town clerk. "We have all kinds of things in that clerk's office. We license people, handle marriage certificates and birth certificates and death certificates, licenses for cabs, liquor licenses, people with ordinary issues. ... So you see people all day long."

She was speaking of that last job in the present tense, the way the newly grieving do when someone dear has recently departed. "Is this what I expected? No." Johnson said, answering her own question, while pondering, as a neophyte retiree, her altered state of being. "For 37 years, I have had some place to go to at 8 o'clock. Adjusting to this new thing, retirement, is hard."

She is 74 years old. She thought she might take a vacation immediately after leaving Islip's municipal payroll, that she would catch her breath from those 37 years as a Head Start director, social worker, elected official, activist, agitator, mother, wife, grandmother, juggler. But there are, she said, important matters for a woman of her seasoning and insight to attend. This brought her to the subject of her newest endeavor: The Joan B. Johnson Foundation. "It will help male children of African ancestry reach and realize their full potential," she said. "We look at the pants hanging below their behind, but it's more serious than that."

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Haven't we read the statistics? And watched those whom the stats depict parade before us in the form of boys in baggy pants, trying, at least, to look menacing because they consider an angry posture to be an appropriate, if defensive, stance? These are Johnson's questions.

"I met a woman from my church in IHOP one Saturday morning late last year," she said. "I said, 'Come on, sit at my table.' And we sat there for two hours talking about black boys." Specifically, they zeroed in on those circling through the revolving doors of the Riverhead jail. And this was the kick-start Johnson needed.

"I told my friend, 'Look, I'm about to retire and I have been dreaming of this foundation.' And she said, "Oh, Miss Johnson, please include me,'" said Johnson, whose foundation's nonprofit application is pending.

Her project is in its infancy. "It's in the womb. And the problems with these black boys are so vast that I'm still figuring out where to start. I'm trying to narrow my mission and my goals - and my board of directors will help guide me - to try to reach male children through social and economic training, with an emphasis on family. I want to talk to the parents. I'm trying to increase the awareness of parents, their responsibility to their children," Johnson said.

Parents will be her entree. "What I'm really trying to do is address the kids, challenge and discuss with them how to dress, how they should present themselves for a job. I've had young people come into my office over the years, and I've said to them, 'Well, what are you looking for?' 'I'm looking for a job like yours,' they tell me. And I say, 'Well, what skills do you have?' And they say, 'What do you mean skills?'"

In these times, retirement is not a personal phase to be squandered, left to self-indulgences alone. If spending those final years at leisure is one retiree's preference and prerogative, Joan B. Johnson does not quibble with that. She chooses, however, her own style of dancing toward the twilight.

"I don't look 74, and I don't feel 74. My mother was old at 74. As I see it, as long as I can think, I can give. I'm trained as a social worker, and I'm going to use that training. I'm going to fund-raise; I know where the money is in Long Island," said Johnson, certain that her current boredom will dissipate as the foundation moves full speed ahead.

"I tell people I'm going to live to be 120, so I've got to do something between 74 and 95. At 95, I'll retire. Yes, honey, please. I'm serious about this."