(FORTUNE Magazine) – JOHN RUGGIERI AND JANICE GLEASON, FLORIDA/KENYA

When John Ruggieri sold his pharmaceuticals container business in New Jersey in 1990, friends were certain the workaholic would jump right into another 60-hour-a-week grind. They were wrong. For a few years Ruggieri and his wife, Janice Gleason, toured Europe, gathering ideas for a lakeside home they were building in Windermere, Fla. They also took a trip to Africa--and that's when their lives changed. They liked Africa so much that they bought a 50,000-acre cattle ranch in Kenya; they now divide their time between it and Windermere. The ranch was on an ancient migratory route for elephants, and is a refuge for zebras, gazelles, lions, and giraffes. The land otherwise would probably have been subdivided into three-acre lots. "In terms of animal conservation, this would have been a bad one to lose," says Ruggieri.

Meanwhile, his wife started to work with Rosamund Carr, the 85-year-old former assistant of mountain-gorilla advocate Dian Fossey. Carr runs three orphanages in neighboring Rwanda; Gleason travels there regularly to help her.

Gleason started Wildlife Concern International, a foundation to help animals, and eventually began taking donations for the orphans as well. "Before, we thought, 'There are so many of these children in Rwanda, what can we do?' " says Gleason. "Now the children have faces and names. How can we turn back?"

JOHN R. COLEMAN, CHESTER, VERMONT

When John R. Coleman was president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, he "disappeared" from his world frequently. That is, he would try out other, less lofty jobs. Once he was a garbage collector, several times a prison guard, and a few times he posed as a prisoner. One winter he became a homeless man for ten days, writing a magazine story about his experience.

In retirement, Coleman has seen no reason to quit his ways. "I was at dinner with a woman I loved very much," he says, "and I was telling her what I thought I wanted to do next, and she said, 'Well, Jack, you're talking about becoming an innkeeper.' " And so, on his 66th birthday, Coleman bought a 30-room inn in Chester, Vt., named the Inn at Long Last. It was a lot of work, he concedes, "but the big surprise was how many friends I made. People came back again and again."

At 75, Coleman became itchy once more--and once more a friend pointed the way, suggesting that he start a newspaper. Now he owns a 4,000-circulation weekly that covers Chester, Ludlow, and adjoining towns. "I can spend time with a kindergarten teacher on the first day of school and not have to explain why I'm there," he says. "Now all the world is my oyster."

MARIE-LOUISE ANSAK, MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

Marie-Louise Ansak retired in August 1993. By October she had stocked her 39-foot sailboat with supplies, installed her black Labrador on the deck, and tacked out into the Pacific from San Francisco. The trip took her down the California coast, past Mexico, into Panama, through the canal, on to the Caymans, and finally over to Florida. "I had an old friend with me and a young man who's a relative of mine," she says. "Neither of them had really sailed like this before, and neither had I. It was a learning trip. We had lots of breakdowns and lots of repairs."

It was also quite a departure from her previous life. Born and raised in Switzerland, Ansak had come to the U.S. in 1954 and become a social worker in San Francisco. One day she had to place several seniors into a nursing home in Chinatown. "I was horrified by the conditions," she recalls. As a result, she started a facility, On Lok Senior Health Services, that helps the elderly remain in their own homes. It quickly grew to a $15 million operation and has been copied nationwide.

Ansak initially found retirement bewildering. "But once I reestablished myself as a sailor, I was somebody again," she says. On subsequent voyages she's sailed to Venezuela and the islands of Panama. "We spent months sailing from island to island," she says. "It's beautiful, and the Kuna Indians are very friendly." The next stop: the Galapagos. "I sometimes feel guilty," she admits. "I'm having such a good life."

TED AND ROSANNA GRAYSON, CARMEL, INDIANA

Ted Grayson grew up on a farm raising hogs. He eventually went off to school, became a surgeon, and spent his career specializing in abdominal and chest surgery. But the farm never left him. "I always wanted to have something on the side besides surgery," he says. "Since I already knew something about raising hogs, I decided that was the natural thing to do."

Grayson bought his farm about 20 years ago, partly as a refuge from the operating room and partly as a place to build a better nest egg. "I realized that I could control my investments better in my own business than if I had them all wrapped up in the stock market," he says. His business boomed, and by the time Grayson retired a few years ago, he had nearly 4,000 hogs.

His operation is high tech all the way. The animals are raised in an air-conditioned building, and their feed is delivered by computer-controlled conveyor belts. Each hog has its own computer record; back fat and loin density are measured with ultrasound. Grayson raises and breeds his hogs so carefully, in fact, that most are sold as breeding stock.

Grayson is active in several industry associations, serves on the boards of several hospitals, and volunteers for local projects. "You have to remember that your attitude affects your general health," he says. "I've seen that as a surgeon--and as a retiree."

FREDRIC LEIGH, LIBERIA

For 31 years Fredric Leigh lived the military life. By the end of his career, he had ascended to director of management in the Army's Office of the Chief of Staff, with the stars and bars of a major general. In between he was deputy director of the Pentagon's National Military Command Center. "That's the job that people read about in spy novels," he says.

When Leigh retired at the age of 54, it didn't take him long to cross the Potomac into Washington, D.C., where he became CEO for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank on African-American issues. Four years later another opportunity came along. It was in Liberia, managing the International Trust Co., an operation based in Reston, Va., that registers ships under the Liberian flag. The move was not only for business. "I believed I could make some difference in helping Liberia recover from war," Leigh says. "Most people don't realize that in the highest levels of the Army, we study peacemaking as much as warmaking, and I've come to understand that peacemaking is more difficult."

So when Liberia's Education Minister asked Leigh to help, he immediately began collecting desperately needed books, computers, and other materials through friends back home. "Some day I may completely retire," says Leigh, now 58. "But I expect to be doing something meaningful for a long, long time."

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Michelle McGowan