It didn’t take Andy Schachair more than one year to decide retirement wasn’t for him.

His wife, who worked for DVC at the time, recruited her husband for a part-time job at the DVC bookstore.

“I said, ‘Ah, I’ll try it,’ and I’ve been here ever since,” said Schachair, now 81 and in his 20th year in the shipping department, where he sends overstocked books back to the publisher for refunds. It is a better alternative than becoming a “couch potato,” he said, adding jokingly, “I get to see all the young chicks here, too.”

Schachair was born and raised in a family of sisters in South Dakota, where he and his stepfather raised cattle, and farmed 640 acres of wheat, oats, and corn until 1946, when he decided to head west.

“We decided to go our separate ways,” said Schachair of his stepfather. “He bought me a train ticket and sent me off.”

Nineteen years old at the time, he stepped off the train in Coma, Wash., where he landed a job building chairs at a factory for two months before heading south to Oregon.

After picking fruit in Oregon for several months, Schachair decided to head south once again to the San Francisco Bay Area.

“There was hardly nothing in Concord; Walnut Creek was a sleepy little town,” Schachair recalled.

“Oakland used to be a nice place to live. Used to go anywhere after dark. Now you don’t even go out. It’s a different life.”

Within six months, Schachair began hauling sheet metal across Northern California as a truck driver. “It was hard work I tell you,” he said.

And two years after his arrival in California, he met his first love.

“I walked in the dance hall one night, an’ I seen her standing on the bench. I told my sister, ‘I’m going to marry her,” and I did,” Schachair said.”

Since then, Schachair has outlived two wives, and is now married a third time.

“I’ve had her for 31 years,” he said of his third wife, Katherine. “I think I’ll keep her.”

After 37 years as a truck driver, Schachair decided to try his hand at a “retired lifestyle.”

“I played golf for a little while,” he said of the brief interval before his wife ran across a job opening at the bookstore.

Schachair works in the “bat cave.”

“When they were still building this, a sump pump was dripping out back,” said co-worker, Barron Bredenberg. “Andy said, ‘Sounds like a bat cave,’ and the name stuck.”

Schachair recently gave himself a “seasonal break” in order to go abalone diving with his family this month.

“I fired myself,” he said with a laugh. “I do this two, three times per year.

“It’s a seasonal thing. In two, three months, when book buyback starts, they’ll call me back.

“Besides,” he added, “You can only take so much fun around here.”