Montuori Profile

By Richard Bambrick
Richard.Bambrick@gmail.com

Jerome Montuori is a 60-year-old home owner in Oceanside, NY, and is the second youngest of a family of 15 children that grew up in small apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. They slept in shifts, and always had laundry drying on clothes lines strung up throughout the apartment. Once as a child, when one of his older brothers was about to get into a street fight, Mr. Montuori offered to hold his brother’s coat. Another boy in the group thought it was a nice gesture, but Mr. Montuori told him, “I have to wear this coat next year.”

The nine girls and six boys of the Montuori family have remained close throughout their lives, although several of them migrated west to Arizona and New Mexico, and five have passed away. Nonetheless, the roots of the family have stayed on Long Island in Nassau and Suffolk counties, where most of the Montuori’s moved from Woodhaven, Queens. Mr. Montuori and his wife, Margie, have two grown children of their own living in Oceanside, and have no plans to move away when they retire.

“Margie and Janine (daughter) are like sisters,” Mr. Montuori says. “We’re going to stay around our kids.”

Moreover, Mr. Montuori is not sure retirement, whether early or after the age of sixty five, is in the cards for him. “I’m just not sure when I’m going to retire,” he says.

He had built a career as a printer, and as a member of Amalgamated Lithographers Local One. In the early 1990s the printing business went into a deep decline that was exacerbated by computerized printing operations that eliminated a lot of jobs. Mr. Montuori’s union was in trouble, and his pension was not secure, so he took a 51 percent buyout of the pension, and got out of the business. He did retain a second pension plan that was related to some New York State work that he did. “I can collect that when I’m 65-years-old,” he says. Social Security will also help. Mr. Montuori is beginning to evaluate the decision to start collecting at age 62, or wait until the higher payments kick in at 65.

For the past ten years, Mr. Montuori has worked as a per diem inspector for a sub-contractor to Verizon, a job which offers no health insurance benefits or a pension, but is an early morning shift which frees him in the afternoons for a second job, which he relishes. “I’m a maintenance and repair man for five group homes in Nassau County for autistic adults.”

He has developed personal relationships and great fondness for many of the people living in those homes, and takes a lot of satisfaction from his work keeping those homes up and livable. “Having my projects every day, seeing my residents, it’s fun for me.”

Of equal importance to the satisfaction he gets from his second job is the fact that he is employed by New York State, and gets health benefits for himself and his family, along with a pension. “Health care is a pretty scary thing to think about if you don’t have it,” he says. Although he will be eligible for Medicare coverage at the age of sixty five, Mrs. Montuori is ten years younger than him. She works part-time as a school crossing guard in Rockville Centre, and has recently become a licensed realtor working out of Century 21. Neither job offers benefits, so Mrs. Montuori relies on her husband’s state health insurance plan.

That, alone, is a big incentive for Mr. Montuori to stay on with his group homes after the age of sixty five. Moreover, he can never see himself as being fully retired. “For me, I’m a lot better mentally if I work. If I retired completely, I’d still have my garden to keep up and things like that, but I’d rather get out and go to work.”

While the Montuori’s expect to remain on Long Island in their ultimate retirement years, they would like to travel a bit, as the budget allows. “We would have to downsize,” Mr. Montuori says, which would mean selling their large, two-family home in Oceanside. If he can reduce his living expenses on Long Island, Mr. Montuori thinks a small winter residence might also be possible. “I might get a small place in Florida. We’d go in January and February. We’d be snowbirds”

click here