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the screen of baseball here and a football there. Bill and I, certainly I, were very apprehensive about the workability of such a scheme and how they were going to handle it. I came into the office on Saturday afternoon to watch it. He knew that I was coming in to watch it, because I had told him about it and told him that he might want to catch it at home. I'd come into the office because I had a very large-screen set in the office, and I thought I could observe it better there than I could on the smaller set that I had at the house.
To my surprise he came in and we watched it. Both of us got the scope of what we were watching in terms of what it could mean. We shut off the set, and he said to me, “Have you got another minute?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “I'm approaching age 65. I don't know what to do about it. Do you think I ought to retire?” I didn't want to answer that because it would put me in sort of an awkward position. I knew he didn't go along with my age sixty-five thing. When I put it in, I didn't even tell him. That's some idea of the kind of latitude that I thought I had and I think I really did have. When I put in age sixty-five retirement, I tied it into a pension plan change, which I expanded. There were a lot of things I did just because they had to be done. When I put the age sixty-five in, I was having lunch with him a couple of days after the announcement. I just said that I had done this. I didn't even know whether he'd seen the memorandum. I don't think he had, but he said, “Why did you do that?” I said, “Because I think that you have to encourage the middle-management people to believe that some of us are going to get the hell out of the way.” I wasn't saying that with any disrespect for him. I was including myself in the thing. He said, “I think that's a mistake. People are good for a long time after sixty-five.” I said, “Well, it's been my experience that once they turn that corner, they don't have quite the same energy and drive that they have at fifty.” I used fifty--I remember so clearly--because he immediately took exception to the fifty thing.
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