"My first reaction was 'ugh.' It seemed foolish to waste time on them," he says. "Their lives were done."
Over the next several years at the Sage Project, Dychtwald spent up to 60 hours a week with his students, teaching them the skills he'd learned at Esalen, taking them on camping trips, talking for hours.
"They loved it," says Dychtwald. "It was an exquisite experience. I was fascinated by the depth of their lives."
Determined to learn everything he could about aging, Dychtwald left the Sage Project after five years, to regroup and study. Gerontology in 1974 was still limited principally to medical and social-work research. But Dychtwald's curiosity took him much farther afield, through demography, history, psychology, and anthropology, and eventually deep into science fiction. He worked like a man obsessed, reading some 30 books each month, hiring a secretary and a librarian to help him order his findings. To support himself, he still taught the occasional weekend seminar, and turned to his parents for help, "but I was still a hippie, and money was not what you needed,"
The more Dychtwald studied, the more impressed he was by the breadth and scope of the changes that were coming. "America was having an identity crises, but because of its gerontophobia, everybody was denying it. The foundation of the country, its demographic content, was turning upside down, and no one wanted to talk about it."
Ralph Nader must have felt something similar when he saw his first Corvair, Dychtwald imagined, or Rachel Carson when she saw her silent spring; he had found his mission. "I had been looking for a theme to my life, and here was a capital THEME." He would report on the challenge of the future, and in his reporting, change its shape, carrying his message to the decision makers in the media, healthcare field, and business, the individuals who would have the greatest potential to help him change the way America looked at aging.
Focusing on lifestyle issues rather than merely on medicine, Dychtwald became a national spokesman for the elderly. While many academics were skeptical of his research and style, other gerontologists compared him with Paul Revere, spreading the message through the countryside, or with Johnny Appleseed, spreading the seeds of the future.
But the early 1980s were also frustrating years for Dychtwald. "I was getting hired to speak a lot, but only by groups like healthcare professionals and the AARP. I thought that the Marriotts and the head of General Electric ought to be hearing it."
And "there was no money, either." While he could make $25,000 to $30,000 a year from seminars, presentations, and articles on aging, that wasn't enough to fund his research for even six months. By this time, he was 33 and tired of living poor -- of knowing his father kept the clothing stores open back in Newark, hoping he would come home.
So, on went the suit and tie. Dychtward & Associates hit the road: Ken Dychtwald executive seminar instructor and circuit-speaker extraordinaire, with the lessons of Esalen repackage to appeal to a corporate audience. "Yoga" dropped from his vocabulary; "stress management" appeared in its place.
"I was surprised by how much the corporate world was turned on to the human-potential possibility," Dychtwald says, "if I called it 'wellness."
By 1985 Dychtwald & Associates was thriving, grossing as much as $500,000 a year for presentations to such clients as Gillette and Sun Oil. But Dychtwald never thought of it as a business. He kept it funky, a handful of his friends around some desks, a checkbook, unbalanced, in a drawer. It was a means to an end, a way to fund his research on aging and uncover potential clients who would progress from hearing his wellness presentation to his "aging of America" speech.
Though business was booming, life as a crusader was slow going; just 15 calls a month or so from audiences who wanted to hear his message on the coming opportunities. He didn't think about riding the demographic trends himself, and in any case wouldn't have known how.
Then he met Jim Bernstein.
As a health-care provider himself, Jim Bernstein had heard Dychtwald speak at several national conventions, but they had never spend any time together until they met in the Washington, D.C., offices of General Health in 1985. Dychtwald was looking for a health-risk-assessment program to add to his wellness presentation, something he could help develop for a fee and sell for a royalty. But Bernstein turned the younger man's proposition around.
"Why don't you start a company yourself?" he asked. "Just hire General Health to make the product -- but you own it and sell it."
Bertstein went to the blackboard. "Call it, say, 'Bismarck Inc.," he suggested, after the German chancellor who first set the retirement age at 65.
"That's ridiculous. I wouldn't even know where to start."
"Look," Bernstein promised. "Next time I'm out on the West Coast I'll help you sketch out a business plan."
With sales at General Health up to some $2.8 million and growing at 80% a year, Bernstein was already working more than 100 hours a week; he had no intention of getting actively involved in another company. But there was a method to his offer. Sketching out one more business plan was no big deal, and if anything came of "Bismarck Inc." he'd have a new customer, creating a simple strategic alliance that would help him move product.
