pittsburgh | The Thursday morning conversation around the boardroom table at Riverview Towers apartments shifts every few minutes among topics of great 20th century social consequence, like watching the History Channel’s full lineup for the day compressed into a single hour.
The anecdotes and observations veer from the impact of integration in baseball to the difficulty entering college during the Depression to the wonders of evolution in sound recording to the joy experienced by the announcement of World War II’s end.
The dozen individuals meeting over coffee and doughnuts, mostly residents in their 80s of the independent-living apartment building in Squirrel Hill, share one characteristic: They are all men, living in a retirement world dominated socially by the opposite sex.
“I’m not for sitting around with a group of women for any length of time. Our interests are quite different,’ said Alvin Salk, 86, a widower who joined the year-old group in February. He had just moved into Riverview Towers, where women outnumber men by about two to one.
The discussion group represents the kind of opportunity that some gerontologists see as important for combating the loneliness and depression that overcome many older males, who may have greater adjustments to make late in life than their wives. They’ve given up the career identities that defined them, and because of physical limitations often can’t engage in the same activities they enjoyed for socialization as younger men.
At Riverview Towers, the men take advantage of a time designed each Thursday just for them, like in the old days when they might have conducted their male bonding around a workplace, VFW hall, bowling alley or golf course. The Riverview Towers staff arranged for volunteer Hesh Reinfeld to begin leading them in male-only discussions.
That was after their reticence for talking among women became more apparent than ever last spring. A resident keeled over and died in full view in the building’s lobby, but only three men were among the 50 people who attended a bereavement session to share feelings.
The focus on Thursdays isn’t on bashing wives or other women their age, but on giving the men a social option that makes them more comfortable about leaving their own living quarters. With a reference to a newspaper headline from the business world or the result of a sports event, Reinfeld suggests conversation topics that lend themselves naturally to guy talk.
Riverview Towers isn’t the only place that recognizes men’s needs. The fourth floor of Presbyterian SeniorCare’s Oakmont nursing home, The Willows, has a separate dining lounge for a group of six men, two years ago, lost their appetites for sitting among a dining room filled with chatty women.
“These were residents who were not very outgoing, not very inclined to go down the hall and enjoy an activity that was happening,’ said Carrie Chiusano, director of Presbyterian SeniorCare’s recreation and activities. “But since we’ve had them together, they’ve become much more social in general … It’s just like when you’re out with couples, the men tend to talk to guys and the women talk to women.’
The group started out just having lunches separately, then requested dinners. They asked for and received a television set in their end-of-hall lounge so they could watch Steelers games and other sports programs together. They play hangman on Monday nights. Occasionally, a female resident is invited to join them.
At the Village at St. Barnabas, in Richland, a group of just five or so men started holding Monday morning coffee gatherings last year. The word spread, and now there’s about 40 of them every week in the meeting place, the Fox Place Pub. Some of the discussion involves scheduling golf partners, but primarily, it’s informal conversation by men, among men.
The meetings can serve a valuable purpose for individuals who ordinarily don’t verbalize as well as the opposite gender, said Pam Fickes, director of recreation for St. Barnabas Communities, where there are nearly three times as many women as men in the independent-living apartments. She and her peers elsewhere haven’t seen a similar need for special female-oriented gatherings because those seem to just happen naturally, whether over coffee, in book clubs or at bingo.
“Women can feel free to reach out to other women and share emotions, say, ‘I’m hurting, I’m lonely, talk to me,” Fickes said. “Men just bottle it up and suffer.’
Edward H. Thompson Jr., director of the Gerontology Studies Program at Holy Cross College, praises one long-term care center he knows that arranges trips for male residents to minor league baseball games. It helps if such facilities are aware that men are accustomed to doing more than just talking as their way of socializing. Men are also happier when they’re free to be silent within a group, he noted, instead of feeling pressured to talk.
“Men really enjoy the company of other men when they can be less conscious of themselves, and less conscious of protocol and etiquette,’ Thompson said. “You go into these retirement settings and the sex ratio is so pitched toward women, that many places are trying to find a way to make the men happy and comfortable.’
Away from institutional settings and retirement communities, it’s typical at restaurants to see older men gather just the same way, killing time together in a purposeful way that keeps them bonded socially.
Julian Zilber, 83, one of the regular discussion participants at Riverview Towers, also meets at a different restaurant every Tuesday with a group of men from eastern Allegheny County calling themselves the ROMEOs — “Retired Old Men Eating Out.’
He’s a widower who enjoys being among the women in his apartment building, and dines at the same table each night with three female friends. But being among men from time to time serves a purpose, too.
“It can be awfully lonely by yourself,’ he said. “The biggest thing I enjoy is when there are people, whether men or women, who I can relate to.’