The Senior Scene

The county fair with one of the longest histories of any in the United States returns this month in King County, followed by the Pierce County Fair in August.

They’re the kind of homespun events that are steeped in Americana and are still standing the test of time.

The King County Fair runs in Enumclaw from July 14 to July 17, opening each day at 10 a.m. at Enumclaw Expo Center, located at 45224 284^th Ave. SE.

It started in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln was president and the Civil War was raging. The fair originated in Seattle and relocated to Renton before a non-profit group took it over and moved it to Enumclaw in 2015.

Livestock shows, 4H animal exhibits, music concerts, and rodeo events are among the annual attractions. Ticket prices this year include $7 for adults 65 and older and military members, $5 for kids 5 to 12, and $10 for everyone else. More information is available at enumclawexpo.com and 360-226-3493.

Pierce County Fair’s history is shorter but still dates to the 1950s. This year’s four-day fair will be staged Aug. 11-14 at Frontier Park in Graham, located at 21606 Meridian E. Exhibits and entertainment will include 4H and FFA displays and competitions, animals, music and comedy acts, and carnival rides.

The fairgrounds will open at 10 each morning. More information, including ticket prices, is available at piercecountyfair.com and 253-847-4754.

By Alex Cook

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a significant shock to the U.S. economy in 2020. Unemployment rose to 14 percent in April of that year — a figure that doesn’t include those who voluntarily exited the workforce. Many Americans lost their jobs, while others stopped working due to business shutdowns or fear of contracting the virus.

Two years later, under different economic and public health conditions, many people have returned to work. But while older adults may choose to retire during economic downturns — which many did in 2020 — some of them are returning to work, as the unemployment rate has plummeted and job openings have risen far past pre-pandemic highs.

Even though the number of retired Americans 65 and older is nearly three percentage points higher than in 2020, the number of working older adults is more than two percentage points higher, reflecting the broader economic recovery and strong labor market conditions, according to a national study.

The study, conducted by MagnifyMoney, a financial information service of LendingTree, analyzes U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey data to examine the labor environment for older Americans, comparing data from April and May 2020 to April and May 2022. Key findings include:

• A rising share of adults 65 and older are working.In late April and early May 2020, 19 percent of Americans 65 and older were working. That figure jumped more than two percentage points in late April and early May 2022 to nearly 22 percent. At the same time, the share of adults who reported that they’re retired is up similarly — from 14 percent in April-May 2020 to 17 percent in April-May 2022.
• More than a quarter of working Americans 65 and older are self-employed. 25 percent of employed older Americans are self-employed — more than triple the rate among working Americans 25 to 39. Meanwhile, the government isn’t the landing spot it once was for older workers: In April and May 2020, 15. percent of employed Americans 65 and older worked for the government. In April-May 2022, however, that percentage plummeted by a third to 10 percent.

New Jersey saw the largest jump in older adults in the workforce since the beginning of the pandemic, going from 18 percent in April-May 2020 to 37 percent two years later. Washington ranks 13 in that regard; 15 percent of its older adults were working in 2020, compared to 22 percent in 2022, a gain of 7 percent.

There are many potential reasons why older adults may be unretiring, or starting new jobs. For example, there’s more competition among businesses for workers, leading to sign-on bonuses, better benefits, and more choices for job-seekers. In addition, the unemployment rate nationally dropped from 14 percent in 2020 to 3 percent in 2022. And during the same two-year period, median weekly wages have also risen from $951 to $1,030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. However, due to inflation hitting a 40-year high, the real value of those wages declined slightly.

Higher pay and higher inflation could encourage people to get back to work. Likewise, the 2022 stock market downturn could have older adults concerned about the state of their retirement savings.

Of course, the pandemic itself helps explain why a higher rate of older adults is working now than two years ago. COVID-19 disproportionately affects older people — though vaccinations have proved effective in helping prevent infections and deaths, and a vast majority of older Americans are now vaccinated. As such, older adults returning to work may feel safer interacting with co-workers or the public.

More than any other age group, older Americans prefer to work for themselves. Fewer than 10 percent of workers younger than 40 are self-employed, compared to more than a quarter of workers 65 and older.

The percentage of older workers employed by private companies, non-profits and family businesses — as well as those who are self-employed — ticked slightly upward over the past two years. In contrast, the percentage of Americans 65 and older employed by the government fell from 15 percent of workers in 2020 to 10 percent in 2022.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, employers tried to entice older workers to retire to trim their payroll costs — and government workers were no exception.

However, older Americans aren’t the only ones with fewer government jobs: 14 percent of workers 18 to 24 were employed by the government in 2020, compared with 8 percent in 2022. Even though the U.S. economy has a strong labor market, the number of government jobs hasn’t recovered to its pre-pandemic high, and both the youngest and oldest workers are most impacted.

Alex Cook is a writer for MagnifyMoney, whose parent company is Lending Tree.

On March 16, 1962, Flying Tiger Line Flight 739 was part of a secret mission sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy when it went missing on a cross-Pacific flight to Vietnam. No trace of the plane or its 104 American passengers–93 Army soldiers, including seven from Washington, and 11 civilian crew members–has ever been found.

Little is known for certain about what happened to Flight 739, and due to the circumstances surrounding the mission, the names of those lost haven’t been added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., despite their apparent connection to the Vietnam War. Many families are fighting to have their loved ones recognized. So far, the only monument that bears their names was erected by a private citizen, Morrill Worcester, in Columbia Falls, Maine, where a 60^th anniversary commemoration of the losses was held March 16.

“When I first heard the story about this mission, I was shocked that nothing has been done for the families. I said that day that we would do something to make sure these people are honored and remembered, and to hopefully give some closure to these families,” said Worcester, who founded the non-profit Wreaths Across America in 1992 to expand and coordinate wreath-laying ceremonies throughout the U.S. as one of its ways of honoring military members who died in the line of duty.

Among the soldiers who perished in Flight 739 were five from Pierce County– Albert Francis Williams Jr., Wallace L. Walcott, Edison L. Roberts, and Walter Glynn, all of Tacoma, and James C. Sorenson of Spanaway. The others from Washington were Timothy F. Hopkins of Spokane and Howard Gallipeau Jr. of Alderwood Manor in Snohomish County.

Their military ranks ranged from specialist to master sergeant.

Spokesman Sean Sullivan said Wreaths Across America has been “looking to connect” with their relatives, but with little success. Williams’ family is the only one that has been in touch, he said. Sullivan gave Senior Scene contact information for a son and a daughter of Williams, but they couldn’t be reached for comment.

Flight 739 was a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation propliner chartered from Flying Tiger by the U.S. military for the flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to Saigon. After refueling in Guam and resuming its flight, the plane disappeared. Searches for eight days by aircraft and Navy ships found nothing. Reports of a possible in-flight explosion couldn’t be confirmed, leaving possible causes of the demise of the lives and airplane shrouded in mystery ever since.

Flying Magazine, in an article in March recalling the events of 60 years ago, noted the U.S. was quietly increasing its presence in the Vietnam War by sending equipment and advisers, such as those on Flight 739 (which also carried three Vietnamese military members), to support the government of the then-Republic of Vietnam against the Viet Cong. The magazine said the U.S. soldiers on the plane specialized in electronics, communications, and sharpshooting.

The private memorial in Maine that is inscribed with the names of Flight 739’s lost military lives is the only formal public recognition of their sacrifice, but Congress could change that. U.S. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan is the sponsor of Senate Bill 2571, which seeks to have their names added to the national Vietnam War Memorial in D.C.

Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington is on a Senate committee that is reviewing the proposed legislation.

The memorial “wall,” as it’s also known, currently has 58,318 names of those “who made the ultimate sacrifice during the war,” said Joe Reagan, director of military and veteran outreach for Wreaths Across America. The number needs to increase, he said.

Reagan, citing his experience as an Army veteran who served alongside the American military’s special operations and intelligence communities, said he knows “we may never have the opportunity to share the full story” of what happened to the Flight 739 victims. “This shouldn’t stop us from providing their families and all Americans the opportunity to honor their service by saying their names in our nation’s capital,” he said.

Location, location, location.

It’s no surprise that where you live would make a big difference in how much money you need to retire there. What is interesting, frightening or reassuring (pick your adjective) is just how big of a nest egg retirees need to retire in various locales.

To provide more specifics, MagnifyMoney researchers calculated how much money is required, on average, to retire in every U.S. metro based on average annual spending. Analysts found 28 metros —half of them in California — where retirees need at least $1 million to retire with an average lifestyle.

Seattle is just outside the “millionaires club.” Retiring in the Emerald City requires a nest egg of $995,000, which ranks 30^th on the MagnifyMoney list. Other Washington metro areas that are ranked include Bremerton (52^nd at $898,847 ), Olympia (54^th at $895,528), Bellingham (124^th at $781,000), Mount Vernon ($777,718), Wenatchee (165^th at $746,192), Kennewick ($731,258), Walla Walla (212^th at $708,000), Spokane (240^th at $696,413), Longview (244^th at $694,753), and Yakima (298^th at $659,908). Tacoma doesn’t show up on the list.

Here are some retirement pricetags, on average, for other metropolitan areas around the country:

• You’ll need more than $1 million to retire with an average lifestyle in 28 of the 384 U.S. metros. A retiree in San Francisco needs a nest egg of $1,564,760 — the highest total across the U.S.
• 14 of the 28 metros in which retirees need more than $1 million to retire are in California. San Jose ($1,424,081) and Santa Cruz ($1,351,937) join San Francisco in the top five metros across the U.S.
• You can retire with an average lifestyle for less than $500,000 in just one metro–Jackson, Tenn., at $495,942. Danville, Ill. ($510,202), and two Texas metros (McAllen and Brownsville, both $513,406) are closest.
• Locals may need far less to maintain their incomes near retirement age once they collect Social Security payments. If you focus on the median income of near-retirement workers rather than average spending by retirees, residents in just three metros would require more than $1 million to retire — San Jose, Calif., San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Are you saving enough for retirement? The answer will depend largely on where you plan to retire, and whether the amount you should be saving is more enormous than other locales. And if an average lifestyle won’t cut it, you’ll need to save even more. But if those numbers make your eyes bulge, there’s good news in Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas, where only about $500,000 is needed at a combined five metro areas.

For the Magnify Money study, analysts based the amount required to retire on the average amount retirees spend in a year in each metro. Researchers calculated the pretax income needed to meet retirees’ average annual spending in these locales, based on federal and state taxes. Then analysts subtracted the average retirement Social Security benefits in that state to figure out how much annual income a person would need from their retirement fund to meet those spending needs. The nest egg size was determined using the 4% rule — a formula where you withdraw 4 percent of your total assets in the first year of retirement, then adjust that amount each year based on inflation.

Source: Magnify Money, an online source of financial information for consumers. Its parent company is Lending Tree.