James Hawkes

2000: Chief executive of Eaton Vance Corp., a Boston fund firm

Now: Seven months into a mandatory-at-65 retirement that began on Halloween Day, 2007. Hawkes took his first two-week vacation in a decade in March, traveling through East Asia and collecting an industry lifetime-achievement award in Singapore.

He stays busy advising start-ups, catching up on years of reading, and serving on the boards at the Peabody Essex and USS Constitution museums. "My biggest surprise about retirement is I actually don't seem to have enough hours in the day," Hawkes says. "I don't know how I found time to go to work."