In the lobby of an Upper West Side senior center, a dispute has erupted. The daily domino game is being displaced by the monthly art opening. Even though this scheduling conflict also happened last month and the month before that, the domino players are upset.

Erika Teutsch quietly intervenes. The domino players relent, picking up their black-and-white tiles and moving to the dining room. “We worked it out,” Teutsch says, gesturing like a shuttle diplomat delivering a communiqué.

At 78, Teutsch is older than the typical person at the busy senior center, which occupies the ground floor of the Goddard Riverside Community Center. She moves easily among the dozen or so elderly artists and onlookers who sip juice and munch potato chips at the art exhibit, and she speaks to several by name. Almost all of them seem to know her name—because Teutsch is the full-time director of the center.

“It’s my retirement job,” she explains. “I still get excited about what I’m doing, and I like the seniors. I figure I’ll keep going until I can’t remember anybody’s name; then I’ll stop working. ”

Erika Teutsch has always worked. Her resume includes a stint at the Office of Strategic Services (the World War II intelligence agency) and postwar jobs with the Reparations Commission in Paris and the U.S. military government in Berlin. After studying economics at Columbia University, she worked at the Federal Reserve and then spent 10 years doing research on foreign economic policy and development for the Rockefeller family.

She then worked in Washington, D.C., as chief of staff for Democratic Congressman William Ryan, who represented the Upper West Side. “This was the most meaningful and exciting work I ever did,” Teutsch says. “He was a committed liberal who saw government policy and programs as a way to make a positive difference in the lives of his constituents.”

In the 1970s, she served as director of Governor Hugh Carey’s New York City office and as regional director for adult services in the New York State Department of Social Services, where she helped regulate, monitor, and provide technical assistance to adult homes and shelters for the homeless.

Since 1991, she has been at Goddard Riverside as director of senior services—where she develops programs, plans services, and represents the agency on issues relating to the elderly. The center offers social services, meals, classes, exercise programs, outings, and—perhaps most important—a place for interaction and companionship.

Not everyone who needs senior services comes to a community center, however. In New York City, says Teutsch, about a third of the elderly live alone, many in what have come to be called “naturally occurring retirement communities”—buildings or housing developments where a generation has aged together. State and city agencies, working with settlement houses and community organizations such as Goddard Riverside, are starting to provide social services and community activities to these residents right in their buildings.

“Just having a part-time social worker in a building can make an enormous difference in these folks’ quality of life and sense of community,” says Teutsch, who has helped organize such efforts. “Organized retirement communities are great for people who can afford them, but what most people want is just to stay put. This program helps them stay in their own homes.”

“Retirement is changing,” she observes. “For many, retirement just means changing the nature of your activity, doing more of the things that interest you. Everyone has their own way of approaching it.”

At Goddard Riverside, she says, “We spend our time living in the present. Some people spend the whole day here every day—that’s their life now. Their friends are here, and they find a role to play at the center. Others just come in for a class or a trip or for lunch. In the present, it doesn’t matter much what you did before.”

Still, experience counts, and Teutsch is pleased by the changing attitudes toward older people—attitudes that have made it possible for her to continue working in her late 70s. “People are looking for the experience that older people bring. We may not be able to fix the computers, but there are important areas where age and experience are welcomed.”