AMERICA'S AGING WORKFORCE

WHY THE PROMISE OF RETIREMENT IS SLIPPING OUT OF REACH

- ALANA SEMUELS

WALTER CARPENTER, 69, ON THE JOB AT MAD RIVER GLEN, THE SKI RESORT WHERE HE WORKS FOUR DAYS A WEEK

WALTER CARPENTER WALKS ACROSS THE SKI RESORT'S DINing room on a knee that needs to be replaced and a hip that's going bad. Lumbering into the kitchen, he deposits a brown bin of dirty dishes on a counter before heading back out to collect more bowls of half-eaten tomato soup and plates littered with sandwich crusts. "One foot in front of the other," he jokes to kitchen prep worker Kim Hopper, 72, as they pass each other.

Carpenter, 69, has worked winters at the Mad River Glen ski area in Waitsfield, Vt., for the past 15 years. Four times a week, he clocks in around noon, and makes $20 per hour carrying dishes up and down the three flights of stairs in the "base box," as the kitchen and bar area is called, putting plastic food baskets and metal tongs and soup ladles in their rightful place, loading the industrial dishwasher with cups and bowls. He has peripheral neuropathy, which can leave him without feeling in his feet or legs. Some days, his phone tells him, he walks more than five miles during his shifts.

He never thought he'd be on the job at this age, but without much in retirement savings, Carpenter has no plans to stop. "I'm broke and poor and still working at 69," he says as he once again ascends the carpeted gray stairs with a bin full of dishes, his shoulders slightly stooped, his gray mustache and hair hidden under a baseball cap, a scruffy Einstein with a slight Boston accent. "But at least I'm still here."