HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
Retired
submarine
captain Don
Hahnfeldt
wouldn’t put
it this way,
but eight
years ago he
came to
Florida to die.
“We moved 30 times over my career and when I got here my wife
said there wouldn’t be 31,” he says,
gunning his Navy-themed golf cart
around the Villages, the world’s
largest retirement community.
Hahnfeldt is hardly alone. Legions of seniors have joined him
at the Villages and the development, which grew out of cow pastures about an hour’s north of
Orlando, is basically a sleep-away
camp for old people who want to
chill out but not necessarily slow
down. Covering 23,000 acres
and home to 88,000 people, it
features 513 holes of golf, 95 restaurants, 63 swimming pools, 14
medical centers and the largest
softball league in the world.
It is also a bit Twilight Zone:
the development’s scale and isolation make it feel more like a
colony than a community. Almost
everyone is old, almost everyone
drives a golf cart — they outnumber cabs in New York City
by a factor of four — and almost
everyone is white. But retirees
of Hahnfeldt’s generation, who
are reshaping notions of what it
means to be old, say that it sure
beats the life they left behind.
“Wake up, eat breakfast, read
the newspaper and it’s
only 8 a.m. and you wonder what you are going
to do the rest of the day,”
Hahnfeldt, 68, says of retired life elsewhere. Here,