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ABOUT BOOMER CAFÉ

by Bill Bryant

Peter and Edie Martin had lived in the same house in Greenwich, Connecticut, for 32 years when they decided they’d had enough of New England winters and New York traffic. So they did what thousands of American baby boomers are doing these days: they hit the road in search of retirement nirvana.

They were not alone. According to the 2005 Del Webb Baby Boomer Survey, 59% of boomers aged 41 to 49, and 50% of those 50 to 59, will purchase a new home for retirement.

After two weeks on the road, visiting small towns and retirement communities from Virginia to South Carolina, checking off the amenities and services they found at each stop against their predetermined criteria, they decided that Daniel Island, a 4,000-acre island town in Charleston, South Carolina, was where they wanted to be.

“You need to do a lot of research and know what you want and what you don’t want before you take off,” said Edie, 58, a retired dental assistant. You also need to be wary of all the beautiful web sites and fancy brochures, she cautions, because “what you see is not always what you get.”

Baby boomers are looking for a change of scenery and a place to fulfill what author Rich Karlgaard describes in Life 2.0 as our “Second Act.” We are people, Karlgaard writes, “who are living larger lives in smaller places” as we seek the “where of their happiness.”

The journey to discover where they would live out their second act also led Arthur Quinby and his wife, Kim Macalister, to Daniel Island. Quinby, 62, and Macalister, 50, were retired from the go-go wars of advertising agencies and living comfortably in Beverly Hills, California, when Quinby innocently asked Macalister where she wanted to live the rest of her life.

The next thing they knew, they were trying to develop a short list of retirement options from an endless list of possibilities. For help they used a technique from Quinby's advertising days when he would tell clients they needed to prioritize their messages because they couldn’t say everything about a product in a single ad.

“We sat down at the kitchen table and we each wrote down our priorities on a single sheet of paper and then we cut the paper into single strips with one priority on each strip,” Quinby says. “Then we lined them up in order of what was most important to us.”

This is the critical step many overlook, Quinby says, because it forces you to focus on what makes you most happy. “Then you compare notes and you say, Okay, I understand that’s important to you, but it’s fifth on my list and first on yours.’ That’s when it gets interesting.”

The couple made four or five trips to the East Coast from Beverly Hills, and visited nine or 10 communities over a year and a half. One thing that was high on both of their lists, Quinby says, was that “we didn’t want to retire in a retirement community.”

What they found in Daniel Island was anything but a sleepy little town overrun by the shuffleboard crowd. The National Association of Home Builders and Builder Magazine recently recognized Daniel Island as the nation’s premier “smart growth” community.

“We got here and said, “Wow, this is it.’ We bought a lot the first day we were here.”

Quinby and Macalister have since bought and lived in four houses on Daniel Island while they updated and added special touches to get them ready to go back on the market.

“We’re having the most fun we’ve ever had.”

It doesn’t sound as if they’ve really retired, but at least they’ve found their where.

Bill Bryant lives in Alpharetta, GA.