But few are as distinctive as two communities just 20 miles from each other in Clay County, southwest of Jacksonville. At blue-collar Moosehaven in Orange Park, residents bowl, shoot pool, drink beer and reminisce about the good old days at their former Moose lodges. At Penney Retirement Community in Penney Farms, a pious population of elderly ministers and missionaries continues to serve God in retirement.
The two communities would appear to share little but age -- both were founded 75 years ago. But they have a key element in common: Both bring together people of similar interests and experiences who help care for each other as they share the end of life. At both Moosehaven and Penney Farms, that approach produces good quality and relatively inexpensive elder care that has sustained the communities for decades.
PENNEY FARMS
In the country church that department store magnate J.C. Penney built in 1926 to honor his parents, sunlight filters through stained glass to light tall arches hewn from red cedar and cypress. A 22-rank pipe organ towers over 275 seats -- all empty on this weekday afternoon. But the church is not quiet. From a back room, 38 voices practice harmonizing a Bach chorale.
Among the hundreds of churches in rural north Florida, Penney Memorial may be the only one that can boast choir members trained at the prestigious Eastman School of Music -- and five professional organists. Howard Tappan, the choir's music director, who died in July, had a doctorate and 50 years' experience. The church is certainly the only one with nearly 50 ministers -- each takes to the pulpit one Sunday a year.
One Voice
Penney Farms provides a retirement haven for retired ministers and other church workers. Residents generally abstain from drinking, smoking and strong language. "Particularly, you don't hear much cursing," laughs Fred Burton, who retired here six years ago from Cleveland.
The non-denominational church is the centerpiece of Penney Retirement Community in the town of Penney Farms. Aside from a beauty parlor and auto repair shop, the retirement community is the town: 477 of the town's 658 residents live there. French Norman architecture, expansive green lawns and narrow streets lined with huge magnolias and live oaks make the place look like a movie set for a fairy tale.
When J.C. Penney bought 120,000 acres in Clay County in 1925, he was primarily interested in creating a system of franchise farms to match his chain of retail stores. But Penney had seen his father, a Baptist preacher, treated poorly by the church in old age and also wanted to create and maintain a free retirement haven for ministers, missionaries and YMCA and other "Christian workers."
Penney went broke during the Depression, the farm project flopped, and he turned the retirement community over to the residents. They eventually created a self-sustaining home in which younger retirees cared for the very old and the sick.
Penney Retirement Community still operates on that model. New residents continue their life's passions -- including hobbies such as woodworking, painting, athletics and oldies bands along with a remarkable amount of volunteer work. Able-bodied residents volunteer an average of 300 hours a year, and a residents association oversees every aspect of community life, including healthcare and the community's finances.
Self-sustaining
Penney Retirement operates as a non-profit
continuing care community. Residents run the community, and each volunteers an average of 300 hours a year helping to care for peers.
Teamwork
Penney Retirement operates much like any other non-profit continuing-care community -- except that residents' lifelong care is guaranteed even if they outlive their assets.
The community, which does not accept public funding, including Medicare or Medicaid, operates a nursing home, two assisted-living facilities and an Alzheimer's unit, all of which earn top ratings from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, which regulates nursing homes. The state recently named the facilities among the top six in Florida.
Rates, meanwhile, are among the lowest in the state, at $94 a day for a private room in the skilled nursing facility. Comparable rates in northeast Florida range from $115 to $145 a day. A confidential community assistance program -- to which every resident who can donates monthly -- supports the few who have depleted their assets.
Residents also work together to raise money for new projects, including additional housing and a $2-million commons building soon to be under construction that will house a fitness center and a pool.
The lifestyle at Penney Retirement is both physically and mentally active. The preponderance of retired clergy among its population makes Penney Farms one of the most educated communities in Florida. The average resident has completed at least a year of graduate study, and the town's library shelves nearly 100 books written by its residents. The postmaster, Mytzi Saunders, is among many with a Ph.D. "I love Penney Farms because everyone you talk to is interesting," says Saunders, a theologian who knows each of her postal customers by name.
All the cerebral horsepower fuels occasional rifts among the religious leaders. About half are conservative; the other half, liberal, says one leader, Orlando Tibbetts, a retired American Baptist preacher and missionary who has published 10 books. But residents accept all 26 of the community's denominations, and most show up each Sunday to hear even the preachers they think are a bit full of themselves.
The sense of community also extends to planning for Penney Retirement Community's future. Last year, the community hired its first professional administrator, Bob Rigel. (He's also the first non-minister and the first Catholic administrator, residents like to point out.) Rigel says his mission is to keep Penney on solid financial footing and to implement a slow-growth plan that will bring in 25 new residents a year over the next five years.
Like the town's residents, Rigel has great faith in the area's major landowner, Reinhold Corp. The family-run company has owned most of the undeveloped land in and around Penney Farms for three generations, since J.C. Penney sold it to his farm manager, Paul Reinhold.
Jack Myers, Reinhold's grandson and president of the company, serves on the retirement community's board of directors. Meanwhile, the company's Reinhold Foundation has kept up generous contributions to the community.
The company has no immediate plans to develop its land, but when it does, Myers says, it will take pains not to spoil the integrity of Penney Farms. "We would pattern anything we do around what's already there, the style of the 1920s and 1930s," he says.
Residents credit Myers for helping push for the town's historic designation and for helping to make sure the state Department of Transportation wouldn't widen State Road 16, the canopied two-lane highway that runs through the middle of the town.
Tibbetts, whose most recent book is on the spiritual life of J.C. Penney, says he believes the community, too, can grow without sacrificing the values that have made it successful.
"There's no question that we've got to grow and that we're going to grow," he says. "The question is how we handle it -- how we maintain the spiritual atmosphere that makes this work."
MOOSEHAVEN
Moosehaven resident Elinor Greenwood is a tiny, spry woman who looks considerably younger than her age of 84. But while giving a tour of her 75-acre retirement community on a three-wheeled, motorized bicycle, Greenwood falters, momentarily losing her train of thought. "I'm so sorry," she solemnly confides. "I suffer from CRS."
"Gosh," the visitor replies. "What's CRS?"
"Can't remember s--t!" Greenwood cackles as she revs up her bike and wheels around the next corner, nearly catapulting her guest onto the sidewalk.
And so it goes at Moosehaven, a retirement community for elder members of the fraternal organization Loyal Order of Moose. Located in Orange Park on the banks of the St. Johns River, Moosehaven is home to 327 residents, all longtime members of their local Moose lodges.
Just as Penney Farms residents continue the church-related tenor of their working lives into retirement, Moosehaven's denizens keep active with the more secular diversions that they enjoyed back at their home lodge -- including bingo, beer, bowling and billiards. "The darts, the pool, it gets you out of bed in the morning -- keeps your mind occupied," says Fred Jensen, 86.
To move here, Moose members and their spouses turn over all assets -- homes, cars and most other belongings -- in exchange for a guarantee that they will be cared for the rest of their lives. The community provides residents with the three-wheelers, which most emblazon with their names, hometowns and Moose Lodge numbers, along with American flags and other adornments. Residents live in one-room apartments in residence halls, sharing meals in a large dining room. When necessary, they move to Moosehaven's assisted-living facility and then to its nursing home.
"It sounds like a lot, giving up your house, but I tell you it's a huge relief," says Greenwood. She and her husband, Red, moved here two years ago -- about the time they realized that he should not be driving at all and that she wouldn't be able to for much longer. The Greenwoods, who don't have children, had worried about outliving their assets and about who would care for them if they became ill.
Elinor Greenwood remembers the day they arrived: "Red sat down and put his hands behind his head and said, 'For the first time in my life, I don't have a care in the world.' That's how we feel. And we feel like this is our family."
Moosehaven is one of the two primary philanthropies of the Loyal Order of Moose, the other being its huge Illinois children's center, Mooseheart. The fraternal organization covers about 90% of Moosehaven's costs; residents' assets provide only about 10%, says operations manager Faye Stevens.
While some residents come with at least the proceeds from selling their homes or other assets, others come only with their monthly Social Security checks, which they also turn over to the community.
Once at Moosehaven, all residents receive the same monthly stipend and the same small salary for jobs that all work as long as they are able.
"No one knows whether you were a millionaire or whether you were on welfare, so that puts us on equal footing," says 80-year-old Dottie Gerba, a two-time widow who had retired to Fort Myers from Maryland in 1990 but couldn't afford the assisted-living facilities in that area. "For me, this was the most practical option."
'Direct reciprocity'
At Moosehaven, almost everything is provided free: Clothing; services like a perm or dye job down at the beauty parlor; items at the facility's convenience store, where residents can pick up things like snacks or denture cream. Beer costs 35 cents per draft glass and is available at a couple of spots around Moosehaven referred to disingenuously as "juice bars."
Brass plates on everything from the residence halls to Moosehaven's buses reveal the source of the funds that paid for them: Lodges in Georgia, for example, just donated a huge jukebox featuring the CDs of favorites from George Jones to Guy Lombardo. The Women of the Moose provide a full-time beautician and salon supplies. (Looking good is important: Residents report a considerable amount of romance, and the community averages five marriages a year.)
Moosehaven and Mooseheart are emblems of an era during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when many fraternal organizations such as the Masons and the Moose formed and became the largest voluntary organizations in the country other than churches. In 1920, for example, a third of all U.S. males belonged to a fraternal group, according to historian David Beito, who has written extensively about the organizations.
Formed along social class lines or shared values such as patriotism, the fraternal groups offered entertainment and social cohesion, but, more important, provided a safety net for members who came into distress. Before the rise of Social Security and other government programs in the 1930s, fraternal groups were the nation's primary providers of health, life and funeral insurance.
Then as now, the driving force behind such a group's philanthropy is the idea of "direct reciprocity," meaning that today's donor could become tomorrow's recipient, says Beito. As such, both donors and recipients consider Moosehaven a benefit of membership rather than a charity.
Since the 1930s, however, membership in many fraternal groups nationwide has declined steadily. And the decline in Moose membership has brought a corresponding decline in money funneled to Moosehaven. Stevens, the operations manager, says the facility had to cut more than a million dollars from its budget last year and lay off 35 staff members. But she insists that Moosehaven is sustainable for another 75 years, pointing to the recent $16-million facelift of the assisted-living facility as testament to the commitment Moose members around the country have to Moosehaven, she says.
Stevens sees Moosehaven changing with the times, perhaps opening up a pay-as-you-go option to the booming elderly population retiring to Florida. "This is a family," she says. "We are going to be here for the family members who are here now and for those members who need us in the future. We have committed to taking care of each other."