Andy Hrivnak was supposed to retire here. He built this house, a redwood contemporary on Bittersweet Lane, as a sort of reward, the kind of reward most people of his generation could understand.

You work hard; you give your part; you earn your rest in the end.

He worked his whole career for Ohio Edison, started in 1950, gave more than half his life, earning a solid middle-class salary and a pension.

As his retirement approached, he and his son, John, an architect, worked together to design this home in Massillon, just a mile or so from where he and his wife, Betty, had raised their three children. It was finished in 1980. They moved in and he retired as planned the following year, at age 63.

Three years later, he died.

His daughter tells this story as she gives a tour of the home, with its two-story stone fireplace and skylit staircase and the canny addition of a second-floor laundry. Sue Kelewae lives here now, with her husband, Ken. She's 58; he's 59. After Betty Hrivnak died in 1995, Sue and Ken Kelewae decided to buy her parents' house.

They'd done this once before, raising their own three children — Joy, Katy and Kirk — in the home where she herself had grown up. Sue's sense of permanence and tradition seems almost like a caricature: she's had the same phone number her whole life.

If anyone ever belonged in the family home, it's Sue.

Three generations are knitted together here, one giving context to the next, in a way that can help us understand how it's possible that, in less than half a century, so much of what Andy Hrivnak believed in has changed.

In his life span — 1917-1984 — these timeworn expectations were fulfilled: Company loyalty given in exchange for personal loyalty. A solid living for a hard worker with no college degree. Comfortable retirement through a guaranteed pension and Social Security.

But the entire formula, especially that final piece — retirement — has an entirely new context.

The classic middle-class retirement rested on three pillars: Social Security, a traditional pension and family savings. But one of those pillars is disappearing. The number of workers with traditional pensions — usually funded entirely by employers through tax-exempt contributions that guaranteed retirees and their spouses a fixed monthly income — has dropped dramatically in the three decades since Andy Hrivnak retired.

In 1980, traditional pensions were provided for nearly two-thirds of all workers with company-based retirement programs. By 2005, only 10 percent of workers had traditional pensions as their sole plan.

The chief replacement has been 401(k) plans, which are subject to the whims of the stock market and vulnerable to the temptations of workers who tap the funds for shorter-term needs.

So, retirement funding, like so many other aspects of the American Dream, has changed radically in the course of a generation. And the question forms: Could this mean the dream itself has disappeared?

The tour of the home ends in the attached garage, where a silver Toyota Corolla is parked, facing out. Its car-top carrier is filled with a young man's clothing, the inside so densely packed with his worldly possessions — vacuum cleaner, food processor, tattered Homer Simpson slippers — that Sue leans down low to see whether the fender well is touching the tire.

The last of the three Kelewae children — 22-year-old Kirk — is leaving today for good: down the driveway, right on Bittersweet and off to New York City to find his fortune.

Old-country work ethic

The Hrivnak family emigrated from Czechoslovakia shortly after the turn of the 20th century. The family settled in Elyria and Andy was born a short time later.

He worked a few odd jobs during the Depression, delivering milk, cutting meat, before taking a job with Ohio Edison. He didn't have any schooling past his high school diploma, but he did have a strong, old-country work ethic, and he earned a white-collar desk job as a residential and commercial representative, which he kept for more than 30 years.

He stayed loyal to the company, and the company stayed loyal to him. It's true that he died before he got to properly enjoy his retirement, but it was there for him, sealed in a package, pension papers and Social Security, the transaction complete.

His wife, who never worked outside the home except for a seasonal tax preparation business, was able to live comfortably in the family home for another dozen years, supported mainly by the Ohio Edison pension and monthly Social Security checks.

Sue Kelewae learned her lessons well. Like her father, she worked hard and stayed put, teaching 36 years in the same art classroom at Lorin Andrews Middle School.

She retired in 2007. She wasn't quite ready to go, but the Massillon school district offered a buyout that bumped her service up to 38 years, meaning she'd receive the maximum pension from the State Teachers Retirement System — 88.5 percent of her final years' salary. With a master's degree and her experience, she was earning about $60,000 a year; her pension is structured to pay about $44,000 annually.

She is fully aware that, as a public sector retiree, she's one of the lucky few in this modern era to have such a generous pension. But even this is no sure thing. STRS, once so flush with cash that it paid a ''13th month'' bonus, has hit leaner times. The medical benefits premium has risen, and Kelewae worries that ''adjustments'' will continue into her retirement.

Her husband's experience, meanwhile, has been much different and more typical.

A year older than Sue, Ken Kelewae should be retired by now, too. But the realities of Northeast Ohio's industrial downturn in the past two decades changed everything.

Kelewae, working on a degree in history at the University of Akron, took a job with the Timken Co. in 1973, attracted in great part by the company's reputation for job security. Stark County conventional wisdom held that no one ever lost a job at Timken.

As he gained year after year of seniority, Ken saw himself on pace to retire in his late 50s — until he was laid off from his job in the company's warehouse in 1987.

He went back to college, added an elementary teaching certificate to his history degree, and taught for two years before being recalled to Timken, this time in a salaried position in the pensions and benefits department.

In 1992, the company underwent a major downsizing. Three hundred salaried employees took a buyout; another 600 were laid off. Ken Kelewae was one of the layoffs.

His retirement schedule went into the garbage. He struggled through a succession of lesser jobs — selling copiers and computers, working at a grocery store — and used a state-sponsored education program to earn a two-year degree in computer science.

Finally, he got back on solid footing in 1997 as a computer tech at Diebold Inc. His division, which makes swipe cards issued to college students, was sold in 2005 to CBORD Group, based in Ithaca, N.Y., but remained intact.

He worked himself up to a salary of about $49,000 a year, paying aggressively into a 401(k). For the past five years he's been contributing 21 percent of his paycheck, with a 4 percent employer match.

Between his years teaching and selling computers, he accumulated retirement savings that he put into an IRA account. His vested pension from Timken will begin paying at age 65; he also has a traditional pension from Diebold/CBORD that will kick in at age 62.

The revised goal: to retire in his early 60s.

Kirk's graduation from Cornell in May was a milestone. The children were finished with college — a time of financial struggle for the entire family, despite the fact that it coincided with Ken and Sue's prime earning years.

The parents, although still burdened with their share of school loans, could begin focusing on the next stage of their lives, in which ''retirement'' will mean something much different from what it meant to Andy Hrivnak.

Easing into retirement

Sue Kelewae regards her retirement as the end of the first phase of her career. She is 58, an age she considers young, yet an age at which she considered her parents old.

Thirty-six years in the classroom would have been considered a long and plentiful career one generation before. For her, it was the stepping-off place to her present employment as an adjunct instructor at Mount Union College and Kent State's Stark branch. She also does some consulting and has taken graduate classes. Work, for her, is as much a matter of personal fulfillment as it is a financial or professional function. Retirement is, too.

''In the beginning, I felt bad about retiring,'' she said. '' 'Old' people retire. I had to change that mindset.

''Our generation, when somebody retired, or hit their late 50s, early 60s, they were old. And when you look now and you see McCain at 71 and you see Warren Buffett in his 80s, you know, they're just in their prime.''

For that reason, she has been thinking not only about what retirement means for her, but what it might mean for her children, some three or four decades in the future.

Last fall, when the Beacon Journal hosted a series of focus groups to listen to local people discuss changes in the middle class, Kelewae participated in a discussion with six people, all in their 50s.

''We're facing retirement,'' she said then, ''and I'm thinking, 'Is that going to be OK?' My parents were fine. They never made much; my mom was a stay-home mom and they had a good retirement.''

The question was asked: ''What about your kids' retirement?''

Sue's response: ''Heaven help them.''

The answer was gut level, and drew immediate nods of knowing agreement from other parents in the group.

But something happens here in the kitchen of the house that Andy Hrivnak built, where Kirk Kelewae and his 24-year-old sister Katy are having coffee with their mom.

It sounds like the Kelewae children, aware of the changes, are actively rewriting the rules.

Facing the facts

Ask Kirk Kelewae — the 22-year-old whose car is packed there in the garage, pointing toward the exit — about the old transaction, the one his grandfather made, loyalty traded for loyalty.

''That's laughable now,'' he said.

He said this without bitterness, and in fact seemed relieved. Here he is, sitting at the family kitchen table, literally on the first day of the rest of his life, and he is explaining a plan that sounds just like the American Dream, yet radically different from the one his grandfather knew.

A week after this conversation, Kirk will begin his career at the bottom, working as a food runner at the high-end Eleven Madison Park restaurant in Manhattan. He just received his degree in hospitality management from Cornell University, an Ivy League school he decided he wanted to attend at an unusually young age and stubbornly, despite his family's relatively modest means, managed to pull off.

He emerged with $36,000 in student loan debt and a strict, ambitious budget under which he plans to pay off the loans in 10 years, $400 a month.

He doesn't expect lifetime employment from Eleven Madison Park, and doesn't want it. Instead he wants to give everything he's got to his employer, expecting training, knowledge and experience in return. And then he expects to move on, for a new range of experience, and then on again, until he's in a position to achieve his ultimate goal of opening a restaurant of his own.

He expects to control his career, and not to have his career control him.

He doesn't expect Social Security to exist by the time he retires, and doesn't want it. Instead, he wants control. Right from the start, he is paying into a 401(k), albeit with no employer match.

''Retirement will be self-supported, absolutely,'' he said. ''It'll be 401(k), annuity, things like that. There's no way there's gonna be a pension in my future. I don't expect Social Security; I'd much rather have that 7.65 percent of my income to invest as I see fit.''

The future of Social Security is open to debate. The system's pending demise is often stated as a given, but by the U.S. government's own reckoning, if Kirk lived to be 100 and no changes are made to the current system, he could still expect to receive at least three-quarters of his Social Security benefit.

Meanwhile, Kirk is setting off on his own in an America on hard times, driving from Massillon to New York with gasoline selling for a record $4 a gallon, beginning his career in the same week a Zogby poll is reporting most Americans think we're in a global recession, a week that ends with mortgage finance companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in a chilling free fall.

Ask him, however, and it sounds as if this, too ,is his preference, to begin at rock bottom.

''It's like, right now if you can get in, and you can hold onto a job through the really bad times, there's always an upswing, which makes the low points look not as bad when you're in a positive vein.

''It's almost like it's easier to struggle when the rest of the world is struggling.''

Career serves lifestyle

Katy Kelewae set off three years ago, much like her brother is about to do now, in a loaded-down car headed west. She wanted to go to a large metropolitan area that offered opportunity, a decent cost of living, and a vibrant core of young professionals. She wanted a career that would serve her lifestyle, and not a lifestyle that would serve a career.

She settled on Arizona.

With a degree in public relations from Kent State University, she works as the marketing and events coordinator for Scottsdale Leadership, a community organization similar to Leadership Akron. She doesn't make a lot of money — $31,000 a year — but views compensation more broadly than her pay stub.

''I'm looking toward making a difference,'' she said. ''If you're gonna do something every day for however many years . . . . you better get some fulfillment out of it.''

In addition to her job, Katy recently has been appointed human services commissioner for the city of Scottsdale.

Her job is a good fit for her now, but she and her employer both understand that it's only a beginning point.

''It's small nonprofit,'' she said, ''not a lot of upward mobility, but because of that, when my boss hired me, she said, 'I know you want a career, and there's nowhere for you really to move up here. We'll be happy with two good years from you.'

''And so it makes me feel better that I'm not going to let her down in two years or whenever and I need to move on to better my career. It's nice to know that that's understood.''

Katy — like her brother, and unlike legions of other Americans in their 20s — has no credit-card debt. The Kelewaes set their kids up with credit cards at an early age, but with a very low credit limit, to train them not to overextend themselves. Katy Kelewae has never upped her $300 limit; she jokes that she maxes her card out all the time, but never has any debt.

''I was shocked when I went to college, and on campus everyone was giving away free T-shirts to get these credit cards with high interest rates. I had a lot of friends who did that and they went and bought computers and this and that. And I'm like, 'What are you doing?' It's not free money. But they didn't understand it.''

Like her brother, Katy expects to fund her own retirement. Her employer does not offer a 401(k) plan, but she hopes soon to open an IRA and begin contributing a monthly amount. She does not expect Social Security to exist by the time she retires, but she also does not view retirement as some radical break from the working life. Instead, she envisions some sort of transition from the meat of her career to something else.

These lessons were passed down through the family.

''A lot of our conversations are right here at the dinner table, or in the car or wherever,'' Sue said. ''We talked to them about (retirement). I think the fact that it's staring us in the face made it more important to talk to them about it. And with the economy as it is, we told them, 'You're gonna have to take care of yourselves. Don't count on a company; don't count on Social Security. Take care of yourself.'

''Apparently they listened.''

Giving up dream job

The eldest Kelewae child, Joy Cosgrove, still lives in Massillon. She earned a degree in broadcast communications from Westminster College in Pennsylvania. After working a night shift at a local radio station while working days at Borders, she found the strain of two jobs to be too much, and gave up the broadcast dream in favor of the more secure bookstore job.

Twenty-seven and married, she now works for Cabinets 2 Countertops in North Canton as operations coordinator, a job that includes everything from sales to sanding kitchen counters.

She and her husband, Michael Cosgrove, have the modest beginnings of a retirement nest egg. Joy rolled her Borders 401(k) into an IRA, but has no current retirement savings plan. Michael has a 401(k) with an employer match.

Joy believes they'll have to fund their own retirement. But she admitted that when they met with an investment planner, much of the information was over their heads.

When asked what support she expects from the government, she said, ''In the public schools, I think (retirement planning) should be something that's taught, from a young age. It should be required.''

More for his mother's sake than anything else, Kirk tugs at the straps securing the big plastic travel carrier to the top of his car. There's an awkward nonchalance, as Sue stands at a slight distance, stalling the final approach to say goodbye to her son.

Katy, poised in the background near the door to the house, tries to lighten the mood.

''She picked a fight with me when I left,'' she says.

It's not that he hasn't left home before. He was away at college for four years, after all. But now he's been home for a month and Sue knows that when he leaves, that's it. The last of her children will have made the final step away and when she walks back into the house, she knows it will feel different.

Kirk sets his Google Maps directions and two cans of Red Bull on the passenger seat and straightens up to face his mother.

''All right,'' she exhales. ''You should be there about 5:30. I love you.''

He pulls her close for a long hug.

''I love you, Mom. Pull it together.''

She walks him around to the driver's side and he slides into the seat.

''I'm gonna stop at Dad's office and say goodbye,'' he says.

He turns the key. The car, loaded like a Conestoga wagon, rolls slowly forward, down the driveway and away.

Surprising news

Two weeks later, Ken Kelewae walked into the house.

It was 4 p.m. on a Monday. He wasn't due home yet. Sue was upstairs folding laundry. He came into the room. She looked up.

''They let me go,'' he announced.

''Oh, my God,'' she said. ''Now what?''

CBORD eliminated his job in Canton and moved the work to the company's home base in Ithaca.

Just like that, nearly half their income was gone.

Ken's retirement, which he'd expected to reach in three years, was off the table, replaced with the question of how a 59-year-old man should go about trying to find a job in Ohio, where the unemployment rate is 6.7 percent, a full point higher than the nation overall.

The next morning, still trying to absorb the news, he was busy trying to pull together his resume, and Sue was running through a mental list of pros and cons.

He's got a good educational background, she said, a broad range of computer experience, an uninterrupted work record despite those lean years in the 1980s. He's a hard worker; the computer field is supposed to be strong.

But this is Ohio, in a bad economy, and he'll be competing against people much younger — people his children's age — for jobs that are scarce to begin with.

''This is silly,'' she said, ''but his hair's gray, almost white, and I said, 'If you're going into the job market, should you color your hair?' ''

No, Ken said. He is not going to color the hair. But the very question — the whole thing seems unfathomable.

''I'm scared to death,'' he said.

Struggles continue

The story wasn't supposed to end this way.

The story was supposed to end with Kirk setting off to help rework the American Dream, to make it relevant to a new generation in an ever-evolving culture.

It was supposed to end with an optimism that anyone can attack if they choose, but that can't be disproved because it is alive, feeding on possibility, on idealism, on evolution, on an American spirit that has always proved its resilience, despite the times, despite the statistics, despite the world.

It was not supposed to end with another setback for his parents, a couple who have struggled through job loss and the strain of sending children through college, of losing a parent at the dawn of his golden years, and of the worry that weaves through any American family like a black thread patching together a quilt.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe that's the truth. Maybe the American Dream — whatever it is — has always been this very thing: a myth that defies truth, that provides the only light forward in a world whose reality can never live up to its promise, and yet tries and tries and tries — despite itself; because of itself — to believe in a better day.

David Giffels is a Beacon Journal columnist. He can be reached at 330-996-3572 or at dgiffels@thebeaconjournal.com.