Great Jobs for Everyone 50+: Finding Work That Keeps You Happy and Healthy ... And Pays the Bills

CHAPTER 9

Great Night Jobs

If you are willing to forgo working 9 to 5, a smorgasbord of jobs can be sampled during the hours when most folks have dimmed their lights.

These range from baking pastries and breads to staffing the front desk at a hotel, selling movie or theater tickets, cleaning offices, or working in a variety of different positions in the growing, round-the-clock casino industry. Nursing jobs are a natural fit here, too. See Chapter 8 on health care jobs for more.

Blackjack dealer Manny St. Mary, a 63-year-old retired restaurateur, typically works from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., three to four days a week. You can find him behind one of the 100 green felt tables scattered across the spacious gaming floor at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh.

St. Mary, a native of the Philippines, initially signed on as a chef in the casino’s Grandview Buffet restaurant when it opened in the fall of 2009 after he and his wife, Priscilla Almazan, also an accomplished chef, were forced to close their own eatery. Priscilla was in failing health at the time. “She retired, and I spent about two years taking care of her,” St. Mary recalls.

But full-blown retirement wasn’t in the cards for St. Mary. “I was lonely. I wanted to be busy. I was a little worried about money and scared that my mind would idle and dementia would set in,” he says. “I needed to keep working.”

Shortly after St. Mary started at ...