So I guess his secret was LBYM and own your own business.
George Stott is a local realtor who retired from the submarine force in the 1970s and started selling homes with his spouse. Mary Lou turned out to be one of the state's top producers for most of the '80s & '90s. Today their kids & spouses run the property-management and realtor sections of the business while George & Mary Lou travel the country attending conventions, training realtors, and working with companies converting rental-home equity through 1035 exchanges into TIC funds. George has no plans to ever stop working, and he says that the "lifestyle cost" of retirement grows higher each year.
"Buzz" Bibby is a submariner who retired as a captain and worked on Kwajalein Atoll for a few more years. Kwaj is a great place for LBYM hermit types who enjoy island lifestyles, huge salaries for running missile-testing operations, and saving ridiculously large sums of money. Buzz lived off his military pension and used his savings to start picking stocks in the late 1980s while he was sailing his boat around the world for a few years during/after Kwaj. He now enjoys volunteering with non-profits and investing in local businesses.
Several local retired flag officers are still working. Their military pensions alone run into six figures, plus the director's checks and their non-profit fees. Bob Kihune retired as a vice admiral and is a trustee of Kamehameha Schools (formerly known as Bishop Estate), one of the world's largest & most wealthy trusts. His last military tour was aboard the USS MISSOURI in command of a battlegroup so he was the lead guy in getting the ship to Pearl Harbor a few years later as a memorial. He'll never run for mayor or governor but of course his trustee job is all politics.
A shipmate is a serial entrepreneur. He retired as a Navy lieutenant at age 37 (20 years of service) in 1998 ($30K/year military pension) and got a job at GE's Louisville appliance plant. He was always messing around with computers and Internet connections so he went from GE to a friend's contractor job troubleshooting computer networks. They cleaned up the network at NationsBank, who hired him away to keep running their CD-pricing system. (He says it was just like running the radio room on a cruiser with many of the same systems, missions, deadlines, & personalities. He even stood midwatches.) After a few bank acquisitions he ended up building Bank of America's bank wire/EFT network. When the dot-com musical chairs stopped in 2000 he started a real estate company in NC. He's just bought 160 acres in northern SC, where he swears that as soon as he & spouse build their dream home he's really going to retire. He's in his mid-40s and he also swears that he's going to read "Work Less, Live More" right away.
OTOH my spouse and I met a retired flag officer at a USNA '50 reunion. He's still working in his late 70s, despite a military pension of at least $95K/year, and his spouse took mine aside to ask us how we've managed to ER. My spouse started telling her about saving to buy stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs. She said "Oh, we never had any of that." My spouse asked "What, mutual funds & ETFs?" She said "No, savings."