Five College Learning in Retirement has been able to keep on meeting and functioning thanks to Zoom, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
When meeting in Zoom seminars I often long to be in the physical presence of others and find that I can’t remember people as well when they have only appeared in a rectangular frame on a screen. On the other hand, Zoom has allowed some participants who live at a fair distance from Amherst and Northampton to keep on interacting with us.
Bruce Goldstein lives in Ashfield, about 23 miles away; this is his is fifth semester with us. Bruce takes one course per semester and tends to lean toward courses in science and Writing to Remember. He is writing his family’s history, as his mother was a World War II refugee from Stuttgart, Germany, and has created a website for future remembrance. This semester he is enrolled in a course on “Great Plants in History.”
Bruce did not mind the longish drive to the Valley for courses — like me, he prefers direct interaction with people.
Martha Nicolls lives in New Salem. She and her British husband have a long association with officiating combined driving (horse) events. They used to live in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where Richard was director of the coach and livestock and historic trades departments, and Martha taught arts and humanities at the local high school.
Martha is relatively new to Learning in Retirement. She told me that when they moved to New Salem she joined to get to know people, and has made many friends through the organization.
“You guys are tops!” she told me. This semester we are both in a course on “Textiles,” one which is both enjoyable and mind-stretching.
Martha was definitely grateful for Zoom when I talked to her for this interview. She was flat on her back, as a matter of fact, having injured her back, but as she does not need to commute, can keep on participating in our course.
Ken and Karen Furst live in Wilbraham. Ken has been in Learning in Retirement for six years and Karen eight. They were both business executives in Fortune 20 companies before they founded their company, Momentum Group, in East Longmeadow in 1985. They are still active, though to a lesser degree as they approach full retirement.
Both are in Writing to Remember seminars, as both are writing family histories. Ken gave an encore presentation not long ago about growing up in Kansas; like Bruce Goldstein’s mother, Ken’s parents were refugees from Nazi Germany.
“I want to finish my memoir so that I can take other courses,” he said.
Karen and Ken said that Zoom keeps them feeling part of a community even with the pandemic, though they also prefer seminars in person. They travel often and annually attend a three-day national conference in Washington, D.C. of the World Affairs Councils of America, whose New York City affiliates create the “Great Decisions” lectures offered by Learning in Retirement each spring.
Janet Spaulding and Laura Frossard from Tulsa, Oklahoma, some 1,500 miles away, are good friends and came to Learning in Retirement through Nancy Coiner, who lives in Amherst but grew up in Tulsa with Janet and Laura.
The three have been fast friends since junior high school. Whereas Nancy was a high school English teacher, Janet and Laura were both lawyers. Janet became a lawyer because Laura had gone to law school; “ … back then (1978) I thought that only men were lawyers,” Janet laughed. She had also taught high school English, and after law school worked for two federal judges in Oklahoma.
She also worked at the U.S. Department of the Interior, where her clients were the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Laura was a lawyer in D.C. with the Justice Department and represented the U.S. government in litigation involving the government’s program to purchase helium from four natural gas refining companies. (Laura is in my husband Jim’s Learning in Retirement course on “The Elements” and chose helium as her topic.) She also taught at Emory University for two years and practiced law in Tulsa (1990-2018). She worked for Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma and became the statewide foreclosure defense coordinator to help low-income save their homes from foreclosure.
So, let’s hear it for Zoom to make all this possible.