Scott Swanson
Retirement, for Gus and Diane Gerson, has simply been a new chapter in what already was a busy life.
Instead of running a large city recreation program, teaching college and serving as principal of a public school, they volunteer as board members for various organizations around Linn County.
Two or three times a month, they can be found waiting on customers at the Sweet Home Friends of the Library bookstore at 1242 Main St., which Diane helped start in the 1990s.
“I’m a person who can’t stay home,” said Diane, 74, who chairs the Linn County Commission on Children and Families, and serves on the Kidco Head Start board, the Chamber of Commerce board and the Friends of the Library Board of Directors.
She also served seven years on the Sweet Home School Board and still has “some communication with board members on issues from time to time. She also works out three days a week at Steelhead Strength and Fitness.
“I like staying home but I have to be involved,” she said. “I like to think that what I’m doing makes a difference to people and to the community.
“I have been given many opportunities to gain an excellent education, develop my interests, and follow my ideals. It is, therefore, my responsibility, my obligation, to use my skills and interests to work towards helping others have the same opportunities. We should all, to the best of our capabilities, do what we can to make our community a desirable place to live.”
Gus, 75, is active in AmVets, though he emphasizes that he never served in the service outside of the U.S. He’s been a board member for the Sweet Home Boys and Girls Club and has been active in the Lebanon Moose Lodge. These days, he says, he likes to play racquetball, fish, hike and work out.
The Gersons arrived in Sweet Home in 1994 after growing up and raising their own children in Southern California.
Gus was born and raised in what is now Watts, in central Los Angeles, and graduated from USC in 1957 with a degree in physical education and a minor in psychology.
Diane was born in Long Beach and grew up in Orange County, graduating from Whittier College in 1958 with a degree in psychology and early childhood development.
They met at Disneyland, where they both had jobs during college.
“She was working at Tomorrowland and she wore that kind of short uniform they had back then,” Gus recalled. “My job was to put postcards on the racks around Disneyland and my statement is that Diane’s rack was the cleanest in Disneyland.”
They were married in 1959 and, about a month later,Gus was drafted into the Army, serving until 1961, then re-enlisting in the Army Reserves for eight more years before retiring as a Sergeant First Class E7.
They moved to Monrovia, in the San Gabriel Valley, where Gus became a recreation director and then district supervisor for the city of Los Angels, and then for the Pasadena School District, and Diane got a job teaching in the nearby city of Duarte, starting as an elementary school teacher and eventually becoming a middle school principal.
Gus continued in the Army Reserves, where he interviewed soldiers returning from Vietnam through the Oakland Terminal.
“It was very distressing,” he said. “I could really tell they were going to have a difficult time adjusting. That was one reason why I re-enlisted, because I thought I could help these guys.”
He said he probably would have continued in the Reserves except that his job in Pasadena conflicted with his military service.
“We had big recreation programs in the summer,” he said. “My boss was putting on a lot of pressure.”
Eventually, Gus started teaching leisure studies at Cal State Northridge, and later, at Cal Poly Pomona, two nearby universities. He decided to pursue a doctorate and ended up earning a doctor of education degree at Brigham Young University while Diane supported them, then she earned hers.
“Neither of us are Mormons,” he said. “BYU is a very conservative school as far as what you do there, but from the education standpoint it’s very flexible. I needed flexibility because I was already teaching.”
The Gersons also raised three children – Eric, who owns Ridgeway Woodworking in Lebanon, Alicia, who is a “real Philadelphia lawyer,” and Dirk, who works part-time and is a stay-at-home dad in Utah. They have eight grandchildren.
In the early 1990s Alicia was living in Lebanon and the Gersons came north at Christmas to visit. They saw a 5-acre lot for sale, covered with blackberry bushes, but with 1,000 feet of riverfront along the Calapooia.
“This city boy always dreamed of living in the country along a river,” Gus said. “We bought the lot.”
Since arriving in Sweet Home, the Gersons have continued one of their favorite hobbies – travel. They just returned from a two-week trip to Italy. Last year they visited Greece and spent a month on the East Coast.
Two years ago, on their 50th anniversary, they took a transatlantic cruise to Spain and Portugal.
They’ve visited all the European countries except Scandinavia and Russia, and have traveled to Chile on five occasions and to Argentina. On their trips to Chile they’ve visited a former exchange student who lived with them during the Pinochet era, after her mother sent her “somewhat radical” daughter to America to escape the dictator.
“People just disappeared,” Gus said of that period. “Her (now-) husband was a real radical. When the new government took over, he became a big shot. They’re doing very well.”
Gus said that his own background in psychology, leisure studies and recreation has convinced him that retirement can be hazardous to one’s health, particularly for people whose self-identity is closely connected to what they do for a living.
“Leisure’s a funny thing,” he said. “People know their financial and medical needs. But when we retire we have no idea what we’re going to do with our leisure time. The funny thing is (people who don’t stay active) become old.”
He said that, although he isn’t licensed to practice as a psychologist in Oregon, he has a computerized test that he will administer for free, and explain the results, to help people determine the personality needs that they need to have met in retirement.
People who are interested can contact him through the Friends of the Library Bookstore.
“It’s important to know that before you retire,” he said. “Diane, for example, needs a service outlet. Without service, she’d become an old woman. I retired at 58 and I’ve never looked back.”