The new senior class

Continuing care communties have turned Lancaster County into a retirement mecca, bringing jobs, money and senior citizens not ready for a rocking chair.

Sunday News

Published: May 11, 2008
00:21 EST

Lancaster

By JON RUTTER, Staff

June Wesbury strapped on a pair of goggles, lowered herself into the water and splashed down the lane.

Colorful fishes painted on the wall of the Willow Valley Retirement Communities pool gazed watchfully.

Wesbury emerged dripping from her crawl. She was exactly where she wanted to be.

At a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) in Lancaster County.

Wesbury, 74, has company.

More than 11,000 others have chosen to spend their retirement years in such local facilities.

The Pennsylvania Insurance Department lists 19 CCRCs in the county, one of the largest clusters in the region.

Senior care has deep roots here, and many institutions, such as Brethren Village, which got its start in 1897, have close ties to churches.

But self-contained lifestyle facilities that offer their vigorous patrons virtually any activity from quilting bees to power hiking in the river hills — and then assist and nurse people as they age — are a newer branch of the tree.

CCRCs have soared in popularity over the past two decades, along with human longevity and mobility, said Frank Schock, chief executive officer of Moravian Manor.

Many local facilities are expanding.

The boom remains robust despite dwindling government suppport and the move toward home-based care (please see related story, "Communities feel finacial pinch," A10).

And it generated nearly $374 million in sales here in 2007, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.

Lancaster Area Senior Services reported that its 17 not-for-profit members annually pay $9.2 million in property tax revenue and contribute $1.2 million in lieu of taxes.

The contingent, which includes one Chester County CCRC, Tel Hai Retirement Community, employs 7,740 workers.

The rise of long-term care has sparked "an explosion of demand" for nurses, said Scott J. Sheely, executive director of the county's Workforce Investment Board.

Then there are the softer, social dividends reaped when retirees spruce up streams, show a high school kid how to throw a curve ball or move cars for the Manheim Auto Auction.

One resident of Masonic Village in Elizabethtown has donated 160 pints of blood to the Central Pennsylvania Blood Bank, said the retirement community's Chief Executive Officer Joe Murphy.

The untold story is that many older people give hugely of their time and expertise.

Wesbury, a retired CPA, and her husband, Stu, are a case in point.

"He has gotten terrifically involved with Temple University," his alma mater, she said.

She coordinates a volunteer program that helps low-income people prepare their tax returns.

"I see a lot of altruistic people," said Mrs. Wesbury, who has lived all over the United States.

"Every day we're glad we moved here," she added. "Every day reveals another pearl."

Traveling Wesburys
Admittedly, the Wesburys represent a narrow slice of the lifestyle pie.

According to a 2006 AARP study, relatively few people choose to move to retirement communities.

"Over 90 percent of folks want to stay at home," said Steve Gardner, an AARP spokesman in Harrisburg.

CCRCs remain a niche market — and often a rich one requiring up-front entry costs that can exceed half a million dollars, depending on the facility and amenities chosen.

Still, Schock said, CCRCs have for many become a viable alternative to home ownership, and a means to access long-term health care programs that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.

The niche is rapidly widening as waves of baby boomers turn 65, said Ron Barth, president and chief executive officer of the Pennsylvania Association of Nonprofit Homes for the Aging.

"Virtually all of [the CCRCs in the state] are at capacity," Barth said.

But why pass up Palm Springs for the rust belt?

"First of all," Barth explained, "we're a very old state demographically." When they reach retirement age, "a lot of people stay in Pennsylvania," which does not tax the pensions of retirees 59½ and over. Others strike out for sunnier climes but eventually return.

Some end up in State College.

But the Southeast — especially the Philadelphia area and Lancaster County — is the state's retirement epicenter.

Around here, said Nelson Kling, president of Mennonite Home Communities in Lancaster, the tradition harks back to the ministry-based shelters of a century ago.

Only the neediest people took refuge back then.

The average resident farmed until he or she dropped, Kling said. The Mennonite Home was "a little wooden structure out here on Harrisburg Pike." It kept a roof over widows' heads.

But after World War II there was a growing sense of entitlement.

Retirement scaled up. The prize at the end of the career path came to include performing arts theaters, wellness centers and even European vacations.

"We have a bunch of residents who just came back from Ireland," Kling noted recently.

The five-year-old cultural arts center at Willow Valley, a frequent venue for top-flight artists and entertainers, recently hosted the acclaimed avante-garde Taylor 2 Dancers.

At Brethren Village, said Vice President of Support Services Phil Hollinger, "If you take a look at our daily activities calendar you'd think you were on a college campus."

Many continuing care communities evolved from nursing homes.

The nondenominational Homestead Village and Willow Valley, which opened their doors in the mid-1980s, were among the first made-from-scratch CCRCs.

Schock said retirees still gravitate to the county for some of the same reasons tourists and younger transplants do.

Lancaster is a pocket city close to bigger metro areas, but with a lower cost of living.

It's surrounded by verdant farmland. It values religion and work.

Locals know and love it.

"Most of our residents are from Lancaster," said Homestead Village spokeswoman Susan Doyle. "That's typical."

Fresh faces
Less common in the retirement world are people like the Wesburys.

The couple weighed dozens of options before moving to Willow Valley from Scottsdale, Ariz.

The pool helped seal the deal, said Mrs. Wesbury, who swims laps every morning.

One of the first things the couple did when they returned to their native East Coast was to re-establish ties to their colleges, Temple University and Ursinus College.

They also promptly joined First United Methodist Church at Duke and Walnut streets.

"Our church has probably been the glue wherever we've lived," Mrs. Wesbury said.

Now, she said, they miss the desert but revel in the culture and community they've gained.

"We're more Lancaster kinds of people," Wesbury said.

Few transplants diagram their sunshine years as methodically as the Wesburys, who have four sons scattered around the country.

Still, their neighbors are increasingly likely to hail from somewhere else.

Willow Valley last year drew 55 percent of its new faces from outside Pennsylvania, said spokeswoman Melinda L. Scott.

The more than 2,300 independent living residents at Willow Valley have converged from 36 states, including Hawaii.

Scott said the facility is creating more private rooms and making its "supportive living" section homier by replacing nursing stations with medical alcoves.

Other retirement communities are also busily building and refurbishing.

Masonic Village, which grew from about 700 residents two decades ago to 1,732 today, according to Murphy, is now filling its new 126-unit, $25 million Sycamore Apartments complex at the front of its campus.

At Garden Spot Village, said Chief Executive Officer Steve Lindsey, 72 new apartments are scheduled for completion in November.

Brethren Village began its largest expansion in March; the $110 million Covenant Crossing redevelopment will add a new health care center and 135 new assisted living apartments.

Moravian Manor Retirement Community in Lititz is expected to start work on an $8 million expansion and health center renovation in June.

A two-year, $13 million update of the skilled care section at Mennonite Home Communities is expected to wrap up by October 2009.

Last year, Mennonite Home, which is expanding Woodcrest Villa, paid for a $132,000 widening of Harrisburg Pike at Good Drive.

The $25 million Sycamore Apartments opened earlier this year at Masonic Village.

And the retirement community is partnering with a developer on the nearby Sycamore Square commercial and retail complex that is expected to help revitalize the western end of Elizabethtown.

Joe Murphy, the CEO, said Masonic Village's annual $85 million injection into the area economy is just the start.

"For every dollar an organization puts into a market in services and salaries," he said, "it gets multiplied three times."

Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Tom Baldrige said CCRC expenditures represent an enormous investment that considerably sweetens the county's economic pot.

According to Sheely, the Workforce Investment Board chief, the health care sector has generated more than 3,000 county jobs in the past five or six years.

At the forefront of the trend are the continuing care facilities, which employ thousands of doctors, food service personnel, cleaners, landscapers, drivers, therapists, clerics, social workers and others.

Such workers earned close to $190 million here last year, according to the state Labor and Industry Department.

Certified nurse assistants make $11 to $15 an hour, Sheely said, a better-than-average industry wage.

But nurses remain in short supply even though schools such as Harrisburg Area Community College, the Lancaster County Career & Technology Center and the Lancaster General College of Nursing and Health Sciences have massively increased the number of graduates since 2000.

CCRCs are working to boost the ranks of entry-level caregivers.

Lancaster Area Senior Services helps fund New Choices/New Options Plus, a Franklin & Marshall College-designed initiative to return single mothers to the work force.

Seventy-eight women have completed the curriculum, which is based on a state program. Some have hired on with Mennonite Home and other CCRCs, said Barbara Verrier, director of the college's Ware Institute for Civic Engagement.

The average graduate is 31 years old and has a couple of kids, Verrier added, so "It's not just the women being impacted by this program but their children too."

Retirement communities promote contacts with townies in other ways.

At a recent Garden Spot Village expo, Lindsey said, almost 70 business reps pressed the flesh with potential customers.

Garden Spotters "have disposable income that feeds right into the local economy," Lindsey said. "We have about 850 residents. The majority of them shop here."

Social animals
Some get their locks clipped in nearby New Holland.

"We have a lot of retirement fellows," said former Witwer's Barber Shop owner Jerry Felpel as he relaxed in one of the chairs on a recent Friday afternoon.

It was the same story at Legacy Used Books & Collectibles, a few doors west on Main Street.

Jann Dickinson estimated that retirees generate 15 percent of the revenue of the store she minds with husband, John, in a one-time tinsmithing shop.

Visitors browse under languorously revolving ceiling fans or sip coffee over a jigsaw puzzle.

They also lug in their downsizing leftovers, said Dickinson, plucking a magazine from a shelf near the front of the shop. The immaculately preserved February 1928 copy of "New Age Illustrated" pictured a cover girl in a winter scarf.

The store handles such items on consignment, said Dickinson, who was also displaying for sale a tote bag handcrafted by a Garden Spot Village woman.

The couple has welcomed daily traffic from Garden Spot since the expo, added Dickinson, who cited carry-over business as another plus.

"We're right next to the drugstore and [retirees] are in there all the time."

A short walk or shuttle ride away, the trimly weed-whacked Garden Spot campus lay agog with dogwood and magnolia blossoms.

An American flag nodded at full staff in front of the visitors center. But people were stirring in the unseasonable spring heat.

A man pedaling a large red tricycle —cane propped rakishly in back —stopped to chat with a neighbor. A white-haired woman guided a purple, battery-powered scooter to her villa in Magnolia Court.

Such cameos unfold daily across the county.

Each elder oasis presents a different facade. Stately Masonic Village, for example, could almost double as a castle. The ivory-hued spire rising over Landis Homes in Manheim Township calls to mind a New England village.

But the sense of security is the same.

It beckoned powerfully to 70-year-old former Langhorne resident Mary Ellen Bough.

"I've never been married," Bough said, "and therefore I don't have family to depend on to take care of me."

But Bough, who has a doctorate in math education, didn't plan to shut herself in behind the beige and olive walls of Garden Spot Village.

She is an adjunct professor at Millersville University.

She works out at the Universal Athletic Club gym on Oregon Pike.

"I think it's important to be with people of all ages," Bough said. "You need that stimulation."

Her neighbor, Tom Plitt, 68, found it on the ball diamond.

Not that Plitt was twiddling his thumbs after he and his wife, Joan, moved into their duplex carriage house four years ago.

Plitt said he had already "basically retired three times."

He golfed. He fished. He built furniture and did repairs for other residents. He contributed to the thousands of volunteer hours that he estimates is required to keep the campus humming.

He has enjoyed living where you can walk downtown to hear a concert, where people smile and open doors for you.

"It's a neat lifestyle," he said.

But, as Plitt noted, he could also "still throw batting practice."

One thing led to another.

Now, Plitt is in his second year with the Garden Spot High School junior varsity baseball team.

It is his second paid coaching job, an encore to a high school sports instructor stint back home in Baltimore.

"We show how to field, how to hit a cut-off man," Plitt said.

He does it for the joy of the game, he added, and also to be a role model.

"I'm a firm believer that every kid ought to play some competitive sport," he said. "That just prepares them for adulthood."

Bill Mehler, on the other hand, has long focused on shaping the grownup intellect.

The 82-year-old retired Armstrong communications executive from Homestead Village is an active Rotarian.

He also belongs to Westminster Presbyterian Church and the Lancaster Cliosophic Society, a group that meets monthly to deliver papers on topics that intrigue.

Two weeks ago, he and his wife, Ginny, helped stage the year's first Quest for Learning adult education program, at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lancaster.

About 450 older people from the community signed up, said Mehler, who has served on the board since 1991.

The theme this time around was "Let's Go to the Theater," he added. "We cover just about any subject."

He likes history.

Previous quests have explored geology, art, psychology and civil liberties.

The overall effect? A kind of goodwill mosaic.

People can find fulfillment by giving back in ways meaningful to them, said June Wesbury, the Willow Valley resident.

"Old people can do this kind of thing."

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Jon Rutter is a staff writer for the Sunday News. His e-mail address is jrutter@lnpnews.com.