What I did all day as a Gerontologist

The appeal of gerontology is that there are so many possibilities for job opportunities. From working as a recreational therapist in a nursing home to running a senior center for active older adults. From developing policy in the field of aging to counseling family caregivers. After I graduated with my Masters in Gerontology in 1981, I went to work for Catholic Charities, where I had a number of positions over my 25 years of service to the elders of the Archdiocese of New York.

My first job was Coordinator of the Recreation Program for the Elderly. Since I was going through serious personal issues at the time – my grandmother had Alzheimers and my Mom, her principal caregiver, was dying of cancer – I decided that I wanted a “fun” job, without life and death components. Recreation seemed just right. I worked with 100 New York City parish clubs. With a grant from NYC’s Department for the Aging, we provided the clubs with money for trips, hired crafts and exercise teachers to lead enrichment classes, and did site visits to make suggestions for enhanced programming. Most of the clubs were weekly coffee, cake and Bingo gatherings, so adding a gifted teacher to teach painting was a real plus.

One of the projects I designed during my tenure as recreation coordinator was “Celebrating Life” which was funded by a local bank. We trained our instructors to translate life history into crafts projects. I loved the process. Visiting the different parish groups and listening to their stories. Some were quite poignant - the first meeting of a Bronx woman with her sister from Ireland; a painful hurt from long ago that still needed to be healed; a woman who had experienced a vision. It was very inspiring.

“Celebrating Life” was a great success and we held an exhibit at the Catholic Center to highlight the finished parish projects. A Manhattan parish club collaborated on a montage of their memories. A Bronx parish did a felt “painting” of their church, with their taped memories. A Harlem parish decorated the parish hall with mementos of the past. A Staten Island club held a fashion show, featuring a wedding gown from fifty years before. I can still see the seniors explaining their works of art to teenagers from Cathedral H.S., who attended the event.

My job responsibilities included: writing funding proposals, supervising an assistant, scheduling the teachers, writing reports, etc. But the best part of this job was getting out to the different parishes and seeing the clubs in action. This refreshed and re-energized me when I was feeling frustrated, overwhelmed or tired of the paper work. The Archdiocese is so diverse: it runs the gamut from poor to wealthy parishes, with so many different races and ethnic groups. One of my challenges was to integrate the Spanish speaking seniors with the Irish and German English speaking seniors in a Bronx parish. A wonderful priest there celebrated a bi-lingual Mass at a long table with all the seniors sitting around the table and participating.

To bring the different cultures together, we also held an annual picnic, usually hosted by the Staten Island clubs, so that they could intermingle and get to know each other. Unfortunately, at one picnic, a Bronx senior tripped over a tree root and broke both arms. My staff spent most of the time in the local Emergency Room. We also had an annual Christmas Brunch at Lindy’s Restaurant in the Empire State Building, provided by Cardinal Cooke’s boyhood friends, who owned a chain of restaurants. Do you think that putting that event together wasn’t hard work!

To be continued...