hands a book entitled "No Gravy On the Vest" and with the subtitle "The Art of Growing Old in Style." It was written by the renowned doctor Russell V. Lee, founder of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. No matter the motives that prompted my friend's generosity, I was doomed from the outset, for Russ Lee and I were friends and had much in common. We had served together as directors of Hewlett-Packard. We both were born in Utah. In the days of Brigham Young his father was a preacher endeavoring to convert wayward Mormons back to Calvanism. My paternal grandfather once served on The Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada with Mark Twain but in his wisdom went to Ogden, Utah and started an anti-Mormon newspaper in the 1880's. So it was the destiny of both forebearers to die in very humble financial circumstances. This was not to be the lot of Russ Lee or hopefully - God and General Electric willing - me. Russ wrote the book at age 82. There is no law that requires reading a book chapter by chapter in the order they were written. Putting first things first, I started with Chapter VIII - "Sex After Sixty" - and then went back and read the less enticing parts of the book. The main message is that after retirement there is still much that older people can do and do well. Russ trapped himself by putting in at the Clinic a compulsory retirement age of 65. When his time came, he was still full of restless energy and great intellectual curiosity, so he turned to other pursuits. Among these he tried his hand at business and made more money in three years than he had in forty years of successful medical practice. At the fees charged by my doctors a repetition of this performance could not be accommodated without materially affecting the gross national product.