October 7, 2003

The older you get, the harder you work
Posted by dwong@bostonworks.com">Dean Wong at 10:19 AM -

Early retirement? Living off of Social Security? Moving South and living the good life? For many Americans, such a reality is swiftly being replaced with the knowledge that they'll be working well into their Golden Years.

Such is the case for Patsy Sechrest, 58, wife of 38 years and mother of two grown children who once thought she'd be retired by now or at least counting down the days, but insteads finds herself serving flapjacks every morning at a Hardees in Archdale, N. Carolina. Sechrest is just one of an increasing number of older women finding they must continue working for money and benefits.

This day will be the fourth straight in a stretch that will go on for 13 in all. She often works 50 hours a week, earning $8.50 an hour for awakening at 3 a.m. so she can be unlocking the Hardee's by 4. By 4:05, she is firing up the biscuit oven. By 4:30, she has the fry vats bubbling. By 5:15, she has the entire restaurant ready to go, and by 5:25 she has her headset clamped in place when, five minutes early, the first customer rolls up to the drive-through window in search of a sausage-and-egg on a bun.

"There you go, hon," she says, handing it to him, and the way she says this makes it sound as if there's nothing else she'd rather be doing at this hour, that she welcomes the back twinge that comes when she leans out the window, and the grease fumes already penetrating her shirt, and the mystery smell that turns out to be unemptied garbage left by some night-crew member, a teenager probably, bored out of his mind, with no concept of what it's like to be a woman nearing 60 who is opening a restaurant in the dark hours because she needs the money to live on.

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