By Brian Bergstein
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - Mary Jones Pelt got the bad news a year ago. She had worked in accounts receivable at Boar's Head Provisions Co. Inc. for 17 years, but the maker of luncheon meats was moving from Brooklyn to Sarasota, Fla.

She decided to stay with her family - and found discouragement at every turn. Some potential employers say she's overqualified; others offer half what she made at Boar's Head. Unemployment benefits have run out, and Pelt, 44, worries she might end up taking a low-paying job in a supermarket alongside her 17-year-old daughter.

"I didn't think at this stage of my life I'd be making decisions like this," Pelt said. "I thought I'd be making plans for my retirement."

With nationwide unemployment at 6.1 percent in May, America has plenty of such stories of disappointment and anguish. But Pelt's experience illustrates the particular cruelties joblessness inflicts on baby boomers, the more than 70 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964.

Many are hunting for work for the first time in decades, but are limited in their flexibility to move and pressured to provide for their children or elderly parents. Meanwhile, employers often can find someone younger for less money.

"The unemployment numbers just tell part of the story," said Leslie B. Prager, senior partner in The Prager-Bernstein Group, a career service in New York. "What many individuals are having to do is take a stop-gap job, possibly a job that would make them underemployed, while they wait for a job that's more like what they were doing before."

The unemployment rate for 45- to 54-year-olds was 4.1 percent in the first quarter, up from 2.4 percent three years earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That marked a steeper increase than the overall jump in that time, to 5.8 percent from 4.0 percent.

The effects can be seen at the New York City Workforce1 Career Center in Manhattan, a federally funded job training and counseling office. Based in Harlem, the center's staff works with everyone from Ph.D. holders to laborers who need computer training, networking advice and help writing resumes.

Counselor Susan Banks tells boomers to make sure their resumes highlight ways they helped their previous employers save money or bring in new revenue. She also helps get their computer skills as up-to-date as possible to make them more competitive with younger job applicants.

"You're seeing people who have been in their jobs 15, 16, 20 years, who did things a certain way - they were in a routine," Banks said. "That's not good enough anymore."

As boomers rework their resumes, some remove long-ago experience and the dates when they got their degrees to avoid giving away their ages to employers who might care. Sometimes they make even more discouraging changes.

Althea Dickson, another counselor at the Harlem center, recently advised a woman in her 40s who has a master's in business administration and had been making $85,000 in an executive position. Unable to find anything comparable, the woman sought administrative assistant jobs, but kept hearing she was overqualified.

Dickson finally suggested the woman undersell herself. They took her MBA off her resume, leaving her with a bachelor's degree. They downgraded her previous executive position to administrative assistant. Indeed, the woman was hired as an assistant, making $32,000.

"It's frustrating when you hear you're overqualified," said Carmen Polson, 49, who has been unemployed since May 2002, when the steel company where she was a high-level assistant merged with two rivals. "What do you say? 'But sir, I need this job!'"

Polson tries to stay upbeat. She checks newspaper listings every Sunday and sends e-mail queries every Tuesday, out of the belief that pitches that arrive on Mondays get lost or tossed in the first-day-back-from-the-weekend crunch.

"Everything will change," Polson said. "Nothing lasts forever."

That might be the biggest lesson unemployment taught 50-year-old Joan Allen of Baltimore. For her, being an out-of-work boomer became a blessing.

Allen had lived a largely cushy white-collar life until new management at a mall ousted her as marketing director 11 years ago.

Never married and without children, Allen decided to gamble. Instead of seeking another regular job, she cobbled together a series of projects - a process she now says helped her "inner person" burst out.

She wrote a book for single boomers, did some matchmaking and recently turned a family recipe into a brownie-making business, Chocolate Goddess.

Getting laid off from the mall "could have been a mid-life crisis," she said. "But I kept thinking of myself when I was 70 years old, looking back with regrets. I had to erase that image. That would be more painful than anything."