After 50 years practicing dentistry in Santa Monica, Cal Kurtzman hung up his drill and embarked on a well-deserved second chapter of life.
Not golf. Not rest. Not even volunteer work. Although he spent a short stint as an unpaid advocate for foster children, the families' problems were "really beyond the scope of my education."
What he knew -- and loved -- was dentistry.
So three years ago, Kurtzman outfitted his aging Nissan Pathfinder with the latest in portable dental technology and began treating frail, elderly patients and people with dementia in the familiar confines of their nursing home rooms.
All of which, at age 74, makes him a trailblazer -- in the large and growing population of underserved elderly patients he treats and in the way he's living his own life.
"As my practice and I got older, my patients got older," Kurtzman said. "I began to notice a lot of patients coming to the office who shouldn't have. By the time they got there they were exhausted, and whoever brought them was annoyed."
And then there were elderly women and men who couldn't even make it to a dental office for care. A recent survey of older Los Angeles County residents revealed that nearly a third hadn't had a dental exam in three years, largely because of cost and transportation problems.
"I saw this unmet need," Kurtzman said, "and it ate at me."
The bearded traveling dentist, who spends three days a week on the road in Los Angeles County, also is part of a new wave of "retirees" searching for meaning through so-called encore careers.
In recent years, the high cost of living and the lack of savings have translated into more Americans saying they will need to work beyond the average retirement age of 63.
But a new national survey released Wednesday found that nearly 10% of baby boomers polled are currently pursuing "work that matters in the second half of life, work that they want to do and that society needs doing."
And half of those surveyed who do not have encore careers -- jobs in such fields as teaching, public service, healthcare and the nonprofit sector -- said they were interested in doing so.
What's at work here "is the intersection of several powerful forces," said Marc Freedman, chief executive of Civic Ventures, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that teamed up with the MetLife Foundation for a phone survey of 1,063 men and women ages 44 to 70 and an online survey of more than 2,500 people in the same age range.
