Older residents in Greater Philadelphia on retirement

Veteran radio host Kathy O’Connell, 74, never thought she’d live long enough to even consider retirement after most of her family members died young.

But after 40 years in public radio, the host of WXPN’s popular show “Kids Corner” recently announced she will retire at the end of June.

“It’s hitting me and yet, it’s still all good,” O’Connell said. “It’s very — boy, it’s a weird thing.”

Her grandmother had instilled a “work-until-you-drop-dead” mentality, she said while laughing. That didn’t seem such a bad idea, O’Connell said, considering she loved her job and what she did.

But she eventually realized that retirement would be more than financially feasible through benefits from her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, and Social Security, which she had been paying into since she was 16.

A changing landscape in public radio has also played a role, O’Connell said. There are also a lot more options and alternatives for children’s educational programming today than there were when she launched “Kids Corner” in 1988.

“Getting kids, especially, to do appointment listening for radio, that’s a big ask in 2026,” she said. “So, maybe the role ‘Kids Corner’ played, you know, it’s time to move on. It’s time.”

Still, she’s leaving in a good place and considers it a privilege to be retiring on her own terms, because she knows that isn’t the case for everyone.

Marianne Roche also found a pathway to retirement after working decades in Philadelphia in disability services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

She officially retired from her longtime career in 2014, which freed up time for her to study Eastern medicine practices like reflexology and acupressure.

Roche, now 77, continues to work a couple hours a week providing this type of care to people with disabilities. She meets with different clients in the Greater Philadelphia area.

“It’s fulfilling in a way that moment to moment you don’t always get in other jobs,” she said. “People want you there. We all want to be treated specially, and this is a way of treating someone specially.”

A desire to continue serving others drove her back into the workforce, even to a partial degree. She’s going to continue working for as long as she can.

“I have no intentions of thinking about ending it until a time comes when, like it does for everybody, where I can’t,” Roche said. “But right now, as long as I can, I’m going to do it.”

For people like Nancy Kenny, they are patiently waiting until it’s their turn for retirement. Kenny, 64, who lives in Moorestown, New Jersey, said she estimates she’s about three years away from being able to leave her job as a school assistant behavioral analyst.

She’s looking forward to joining many of her friends and other colleagues who have already retired.

“​​I want to go out to lunch with my friends, I want to enjoy my garden. I want to do all those little things. Little things — they’re not big things,” she said.

But Kenny needs the financial pieces to fall into place. She’ll be eligible for a full state pension after she reaches 25 years of service in a couple years. She’ll hit that milestone a bit later than her peers, because she started her career after staying at home for about 11 years to raise three children.

After 65, she’ll also be eligible for Medicare health insurance, which she will need once she loses her employer-based coverage.

Preparing for retirement is like doing a lot of homework, Kenny said.

“You have to do math all the time,” she said and laughed.

As she waits, she’ll be busy caring for kindergarteners with intellectual and developmental disabilities. At times, it can be physically taxing.

“I am thankful that I can still run after them, I can still catch them. And you know, there’s a lot of bending down, getting down on the floor, changing diapers, I do all that,” she said. “But I think, ‘Am I going to do it three years from now? Can I keep doing this?’”

She also finds it more difficult to relate to her colleagues at work, who are great, she said, but much younger.

“So I don’t belong there anymore, you know,” Kenny said. “It’s time for me to move on and I recognize that.”