42 Jim Later Life Still Studying

                                                     This is article from local paper.

                                     THESE RETIREES AREN'T LETTING THEIR MINDS GO
                                                                 by John Wood
    James E. "Jim" Stermer raised a bush of an eyebrow, gathered his hands on his lap and listened. 
William J. Neisel was reading out loud from a book abaout the computr world - a serious plodding tome.  Neisel and Stermer are friends.
    The two got together last summer when Neisel, 71 answered an adveertisement abaout a volunteer reader for Stermer, 78, and all but blind.  Since then they've grown fond of each other. 
   Neisel has a strong, modulated voice, and he uses it every day of the week to read to Stermer in Stermeer's room at th Brookside Guest Home on Spring Street in Henderville.
   A lifelong scholar, Stermer is all but blind now. A cataract removed from his one remaining eye last February left him able to see large blotches of color and light, nothing else.  He's also suffered a stroke and speaks slowly and carefully.  Despite his physical handicaps, Stermeer's mind is alert as ever.  So Neisel reads books to him. 
   "I think Jim and I feel you don't have to deteriorate with age."  Neisel said during a break from the reading.  "Jim has been a scholar all his life.  I've always been a reader.  It's almost like going back to college.  I've learned so much from Jim."
   The two study in Stermeer's room at Brookside, a rambling, one story affair known among its tenants for homestyle neatness, kindness and world-class food -- including chili-dogs that owner Tate Sanders makes now and then for lunch.
   Brookside's a place for the graying of haair, senior citizens, retirees.  It is a place for those perhaps a little stooped in the shoulder, but whose brain cells still click.
   "Jim's the liberal one of the team and I'm the conservative," said Neisel who lives with his wife in Hendersonville.  "Sop we balance out each other."  
   Neisel will read for awhile until Stermer asks him to repeat a sentence or paragraph.  Neisel reads it over "and then we discuss what we've been reading."  Their reading has already taken them through four books and they've started on a fifth.  They've also completed a study of Astec, Mayan and Inca cultures. 
   "We don't agree always." Stermer said haltingly.   "It's a dialogue between the two of us" Indeed, they believe that their separate backgrounds compliment each other's thoughts.
    Stermer born in Ohio and grew up in Michigan where he attended college and graduate school.  During his life he's lived in New Mexico and Kentucky.  In the 1960s he chaired the sociology department at Berrea College in Kentucky.
    Throughout his career as a jubvenile counselor and then as a professor, he's been an adventurer.
     "I've been an adventurer all my life." he said.  "In 1928 my brother and I went from Detroit to New Orleans in a canoe.  We traveled for 40 days and 40 night."
   The rivers flooded that year.  At night he slept in the canoe as it drifted with the current. 
   Neisel grew up in Long Island, N.Y., attended Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., and after a coupe of jobs became a salesman for Sterling Drug Co.  The job took him to South America, where he spent the bulk of his career selling pharmaceuticals in Brazil, Columbis, Chili and Trinidad.  He retired to Hendersonville in the early 1970s.  Stermer's river journey and Neisels expeeriences in South America compelled them to read The Sea and the Jungle by H.L. Tomlinson, a book about a 2,000mile river trip into theinterior of Brazil.  It was their first book.
   Spurred by South America, they read sseveral books on native Indian cultures, which resulted in a comparative study of the Aztecs, Mayans and Inca civilizations.  The discovered each had highly organized, sometimes aggressive cultures. Both agree they had a choice. 
   What's surprising about that is Neisel, an life-long businessman, is a capitalist and the Inca economy was communistic. Stermer, ther liberal of the two, wouldn't have minded that so much as Neisel. 
   "But it was a paternalistic, communistic, benevolent dictatorship," Neisel said. 
   "It was a more humanistic community than the othrs.  People's need were met."
   In Stermer's tiny Brookside room furnished with a simple bed, a comfortable chair, some shelves containing a record player --for "talking books"-- a TV and a dresseer, the two read.  It stimulates Stermer, whose previously adventurous life is now confined to Brookside.
   With the books, Stermer and Neisel consider themselves adventurers still. 
   "Your imagination goes on though you get old," Stermer said.