Senior Spotlight
Retirement Reinvention By Beth A. Klahre
H
elen Whittaker has always loved the coast. She vacationed in Garden City Beach, South Carolina since she was 6 years old. She married in a small church in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina and she and husband Gary continued to vacation at the shore. In 2004, Gary, a private pilot, took a detour and flew up the coast on their way back to Tennessee from a vacation. Helen recalls, “It was lunchtime, so we landed at Cape Fear Regional Jetport and went to Oak Island to eat. We fell in love with the area. It reminded us of how the beaches used to be. Not overbuilt. Old-fashioned.” Back home, Helen researched retirement communities near Oak Island and found St. James Plantation. They returned for a discovery weekend and bought a home.
Helen retired in 2017 after 17 years as the director of Kingsport Public Library in Kingsport, Tennessee. Gary retired the day after Helen and they headed to Southport. An avid golfer, Gary was all set
with his retirement plan after 32 years as a materials engineer with Eastman Chemical Company. Helen, on the other hand, had only planned to “not jump into too many things for a few months.” She says, “Finding your retirement feet isn’t easy. People talk about how wonderful it is to be retired and not have to go to work. And it is! But then what? It’s a big adjustment that people don’t really like to talk about.”
And so began her retirement reinvention. The roots go back to her college days. Helen attended Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia where she majored in English. “I chose Agnes Scott because it was small, southern, and all female. The environment was empowering. All the organizations and committees had young female leaders.” And there were perks! Helen laughs, “If there was a big dance that night with Georgia Tech, we could go to our classes with curlers in our hair! Remember curlers? Or if we
overslept for early class, we could throw a raincoat over our PJ’s and run across the quad to class.” After graduation, Helen attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, obtaining a master’s in library science followed by 10 years working in public libraries. And then it was back to academia at the University of South Carolina, Columbia for a master’s in journalism. “I intended to work in public relations. But life happened and I ended up back in public libraries. I used my new journalism skills to create public relations materials for the library.”
By the time she retired, Helen felt burned out in the library world. But she kept seeing ads posted by Friends of the Library Southport and Oak Island (FOLSOI) for a grant writer. “And I kept seeing them,” she recalls of the persistent nudge. “I knew libraries needed every bit of money that could be found and grant writing was certainly in my
