Retirement looks different to different people. For some, it's a time to slow down, ease out of commitments, and possibly move to a warmer climate. For others, it's a time to discover a new passion or find a way to give back. Bill Reichman, aka Bill the Baker, falls into the latter category, having turned his love of baking bread into somewhat of a late-in-life career that benefits the greater community.

With a nickname like Bill the Baker, people might expect that Bill always worked in the baking industry. But as a veteran of the technology and electronics world, Bill had never even taken a baking class until about 15 years ago. Today, he teaches baking classes to both children and adults from around the world using the internet as his classroom, and he can't think of anything he'd rather be doing with his time.

So how did an engineer from Long Island end up teaching free baking classes to kids? As Bill says, "It's been a great story. Although he had no formal training in baking, he grew up in a large family-oriented household where cooking and meal time were celebrated. "For 16-plus years growing up in my parent's home, I had the benefit of my grandmother living with us," he remembers. "My grandmother ran the kitchen like it was a diner for both breakfast and lunch. Each person was allowed to ask for whatever they wanted to eat. The dinner hour was planned by my grandmother, and everyone ate the same thing. The dinner table was a traditional table with everyone sitting down at the same time and sharing a meal and conversation. Most of the breads and desserts that were served in our home were made by my grandmother: But things changed, he recalls, when his grandmother fell and broke her hip and could no longer stand in the kitchen and cook. Since Bill was the first one home at the end of the day, he became responsible for putting dinner on the table. "My grandmother and my mother wrote out very detailed instructions for making the dinner, and I would come home from school and follow those instructions;' he shares. "I have had chefs and bakers tell me that this is the reason why I am such a good baker - I was trained to follow recipes very closely'.'

After high school, Bill went off to college at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, which is also where his wife Donna went to school, but the two didn't meet until after they graduated. Bill then went to work for IBM as a field engineer, and eventually married Donna and settled in Greenlawn, New York, where they lived until the mid-1970s. Bill says it was a trip to visit Donna's brother and his wife Phyllis in Virginia that piqued his interest in baking."lt turned out that Phyllis was a fabulous baker, and all the breads she served us on that visit were freshly made each day'.' Those fresh-baked breads rekindled Bill's memories of his childhood, and he announced to his family that he wanted to learn to bake bread. Donna bought him a bread-baking book, and his hobby was born. "That was 1972, and I never looked back;' he says.

Bill and Donna have two sons (and four grandchildren!), and Bill says baking bread with them in the kitchen on weekends when they were young was part of their family life. "They pretended to make bread while playing with the flour and water I gave them while I made our bread for the week," he recalls. "It gave us great memories of working together in the kitchen: But while Bill baked lots of loaves of bread over the years, he says if a cake or dessert was required from their kitchen, it was Donna who took care of that.

Of course, life soon got busy, and Bill's bread baking eventually took a back seat to other obligations. In fact, he says by the time their boys moved out on their own, life had become too busy for him to do much baking at all. During that time, the Reichman family moved from New York to Ohio and then to New Jersey, where they lived until 2005. "In 1997, I accepted a position with a company based in Itasca, Illinois," he says. He was promised he could work remotely from New Jersey and manage his small team of employees. However, the team quickly grew, and Bill eventually was spending Monday through Friday in Chicago. "The two worst airports for on-time flights during that period (1998-2005) were Chicago O'Hare and Newark, New Jersey; he laughs. When all the back and forth became too much, Bill and Donna decided to relocate to the Chicago area, homing in on St. Charles as the type of community they wanted to live in and finding a home in the Royal Fox neighborhood. "We both agreed that St. Charles was the closest to what we were leaving behind in New Jersey," he adds.

After being settled in St. Charles for a few years, Bill says it was a trip to Napa Valley with some friends that got him thinking about baking bread again. So once more, Donna went out and got him a new bread-baking book, and he was amazed to learn how much the craft had changed over time. "The quality of the breads I was exposed to (in Napa) were many times better than what I had been making over the years," he admits. "When I started in 1972, I was not even aware of bread flour."

But as his renewed interest in bread baking started to take off, his technology career began to wind down. He says retirement came about five years sooner than planned, and when that happened, he started thinking about what his next chapter would look like. A friend who owned DRM Delicatessen & Restaurant convinced him to come on board as a baker, but after a few months, Bill discovered that working at a restaurant did not make him happy. What he did want to do, he realized, was teach baking classes. His friend then offered his restaurant kitchen to use as a classroom on Mondays when the restaurant was closed, and it appeared that Bill was off to a great start.

But as everyone remembers, COVID-19 threw a wrench in a lot of plans, including Bill's classes. And while he was disappointed that the classes had to stop, in general, he remembers feeling sorry for the children. "There was no way they could understand what was happening to them;' he says. "I told my wife that I was going to offer an on line class for them. I advertised it on Facebook, and about eight families registered for that class:'Word of Bill's class soon spread, and eight months later he had 192 families from six different countries participating! He says he was doing two or three classes a day, seven days a week. But things began to slow down once people started going back to work following the lockdowns, as one of the requirements for enrolling in Bill's class was that each child have an adult in the kitchen with them.

From here things took another slight turn. Bill says early on when he was doing his free children's classes, he noticed a handful of kids who were more advanced than the others, and he felt that they were being held back. So, he asked their parents for permission to segregate those children into an advanced class. I told the parents the classes would still be free, but much smaller in size and the children would be tasked with making harder recipes." That, he says, was the origin of Bill the Baker's Children's Advanced Baking Skills Class, and three and a half years later, those classes are still taking place. In late 2022, Bill held his 100th advanced class.

"I am most proud of those classes and those students," he shares, adding, " I have loved every minute of it, and I look forward to continuing as long as God allows me to do it:'