CONVENTION CRASHING

Thursday, July 5, 2007 | 7:29 a.m.

John Kuryla, standing there in a convention booth with his glasses, gray hair, straight-ahead gaze, firm handshake and assured smile, looks like a pro, like he's been with the company for years. Probably a corporate vice president.

Don't be fooled.

Kuryla has been with the company for a couple of days and when the convention leaves town, he goes home to Anthem in southwest Henderson. He and his wife, Ruth, work together as temps at conventions, partly for pocket money, but mostly for fun. Kuryla's a 62-year-old retired financial planner from Newport Beach, Calif., and when he was helping others prepare for retirement, he never imagined he would spend his doing this.

"No matter how well you plan for retirement," Kuryla says, "you always have too much time on your hands."

He's not the only one, either. While most people know conventions hire temps, the temps that come to mind are actors and models passing out brochures, but there are more than a few retirees working as ringers.

Manpower Inc., the largest supplier of convention temps, estimates that at any given time 120 of its 2,000 to 3,000 readily available workers are officially retired. And while heavy lifting is usually out, Manpower's Nicole Milici says, they're very useful behind registration desks and working as greeters, room monitors and sometimes salespeople.

"It's life experience," Milici says. "They're better equipped to handle different circumstances than people who are just starting out."

Carolyn "Tootie" Hampton, a grandmother and retired Illinois bartender, has been working at conventions and staffing agencies for the past eight years and has seen a little bit of everything.

"Once I did spray-on nylons and had people come up all day long and touch my leg, men too," Hampton says. "And you could swear I had real nylons on."

Recently, Hampton and a partner, Judi DeLaney, started their own staffing agency, All-Star Staffing. Many of their staffers are retired, often retired professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and pilots.

Many, DeLaney says, haven't found their place in Las Vegas and are looking for something to do. And they have something more to offer than younger temps.

"They dress properly, they speak properly," DeLaney says, "and they provide good customer service, which is so often lacking in this town."

Kuryla and his wife, for instance, work for Manpower and All-Star Staffing, and he has a knack for sales, which can save a company much more than his wages when compared with the cost of sending out one of its own sales reps.

"As you can probably tell, I do have a bit of the gift of gab," Kuryla says. "Probably too much some times."

(Kuryla is not only a consummate, but a constant salesman. An interview conducted at the Anthem community center came complete with a tour and glowing praise of each amenity.)

Kuryla says he and his wife were sold on working conventions when, at one of their first ones, a bank convention where they worked as door monitors, they were invited in and given a fancy dinner and got to see Jay Leno do a private show. (He's much funnier in person, Kuryla says.)

In his retirement, Kuryla says , he's found he prefers working when he wants to and not because he has to. The important thing, he says, is to ask about food before the convention starts. If it's not provided, he and Ruth pack lunches. The convention concessions are not an option.

"There's certain pet peeves I have, and that's one of them," Kuryla says. "I'm not paying that kind of money for a hot dog."

Beyond that, it's a pretty good gig. More than that, Kuryla says that he and Ruth have found, especially because they don't have children and grandchildren to keep up with, that working at conventions is a way to meet people and is almost a kind of recreation.

"We don't golf, we don't play tennis and we already got our traveling out of the way," Kuryla says.

"This really does keep us young. It gives us the exercise we need and keeps us meeting new people."