Thomas Marshall had been retired for several years when he decided to go back to work. He wanted to do something new that satisfied him intellectually and physically while providing him with a flexible schedule.
He couldn’t find that in just one job. So he took on three: teaching business classes, keeping the books for a nonprofit and working on a ferry dock.
Thomas Marshall
Age: 68
Hometown: Rockland, Maine
Primary career: Marketing, sales and banking
Current path: Bookkeeping, teaching, ferry worker
Why this path: “I feel a sense of urgency both in the day and my own mortality.”
It was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. “Each job has its own fascination,” he says. “The bookkeeper is quietly analytical. The professor is a teacher/showman/adviser to Gen Z. The ferryman is constantly on his feet, aware of an ever-changing queue, and dealing with the stress of getting everyone on the boat.”
Mr. Marshall, who is 68, lived most of his life in New Jersey, working first in marketing and sales with AT&T, then in banking. He retired early, at the age of 63, to help take care of his sick parents. But after his parents passed away, he and his wife decided to leave New Jersey. Two years ago, they moved to Rockland, Maine.
It was a little too relaxing at first. The couple had spent many happy vacations in Maine. But after six months, Mr. Marshall says, “I didn’t know what day of the week it was anymore. I had to get out and do something and feel productive.”
Mr. Marshall went into overdrive, compelled in part by a sense of his own mortality after caring for his dying parents, he says, but also by a long-held curiosity about what it would be like to work at multiple small jobs at the same time.
He benefited from having a desirable and diverse skill set.
Right off the bat, he discovered that a local nonprofit, the Coastal Children’s Museum, had recently lost its bookkeeper. Mr. Marshall had majored in accounting as an undergraduate. That landed him his first postretirement job. He now spends one morning a week going over the museum’s books.
He next got a job with the University of Maine in Augusta. He had some experience teaching business courses and computer programming at several New Jersey colleges. So UMA hired him to teach a course on management information systems. He started in the 2018 spring semester, once a week delivering a 100-minute lecture in a classroom/studio setting in Augusta. His class is also streamed live to UMA distance learners at locations around the state.
He enjoys the performance part of teaching. “I’m a hambone,” he says.
Once his first semester ended, though, he was looking for more work again. On a stroll along Rockland’s waterfront, Mr. Marshall saw a help-wanted sign in front of the Maine State Ferry Service terminal. Thinking about the long, quiet summer ahead, he applied. Now, a few days a week—and in all kinds of weather—he helps get vehicles and passengers on and off a ferry that crisscrosses Penobscot Bay.
“It’s a ballet of people going to work, home or vacation…rain or shine or snow as long as the captain says he wants to go,” Mr. Marshall says.
“My society consists of able-bodied seamen, boat captains, truckers hauling bait and lobsters, fishermen, islanders and wide-eyed vacationers,” says Mr. Marshall. It’s “a constant Rubik’s cube. You never know what you’ll find.”
Mr. Marshall’s three jobs all offer him opportunities to work more than he wants, he says. On rare occasions, on days that he teaches, he cannot accept an assignment from the ferry service.
He says he is still working on getting his multitasking right. “There’s a part of me that says I should be sitting in a lawn chair watching the Red Sox game,” he says. “But then I kick myself. The next thing I know, I’m standing on the pier for the ferry while 25-ton dump trucks whisk past me heading out to the islands in the middle of a gale.”
Second Acts looks at the varied paths people are taking in their 50s and beyond. Email Ms. Halpert, a writer in Michigan, or let us know how you’re starting over, at reports@wsj.com.
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