Now for the tricky part. After working for one company on one block for 40 years, Dennis Young says retirement will be like getting out of college all over again.

The official end comes in March, when Young will depart from his position as executive vice president and chief financial officer for Wells Fargo Financial. The beginning came in 1965, when he and his roommate at Buena Vista College drove down to Des Moines near the end of their senior year and snagged a couple of jobs.

“It was not difficult getting a job in those days,” said Young, now 62. “He went to Bankers Life (now Principal Financial Group Inc.), and I went to Dial Finance. I didn’t know anything about the company, but I was so impressed with the people that I knew it was where I wanted to work.”

As Dial was acquired by Norwest Corp., and Norwest merged with Wells Fargo & Co., Young moved from building to building within the same downtown block and worked his way up from administrative assistant to assistant treasurer to vice president and treasurer. He was named CFO in 1984 and became an executive vice president in 1998.

Young describes himself as a workaholic, an employee who tends to put in 60-hour weeks. “That grew as the years went by,” he said. “Especially after the kids had gone off to college, it was easy to find me here on Saturday and sometimes on Sunday.”

The numbers that he worked with grew exponentially over four decades, of course. “I remember when we had about $25 million outstanding in our commercial paper program,” he said. “A couple of years ago, it was $4 billion.” He still remembers working on $5 million in notes for Bankers Life; last year he was involved in not one but two financings worth a billion dollars apiece.

“I would think I’ve done more financings than anyone else in the state,” he said.

Richard Levitt was in charge at Dial when Young started his career, and he credits Levitt for influencing his course in more than one way. “He encouraged people to get involved in the community, and in the industry,” Young said. So he helped out locally with the Girl Scouts and the former National Conference of Christians and Jews, among other groups, and worked with the American Financial Services Association at a national level.

About 12 years ago, Maddie Levitt and Charlie Edwards paid him a visit. “I thought they were going to ask for money,” Young said, but instead they invited him to serve on the board of the Des Moines Art Center. He recently stepped down as president of that board.

And somehow, even though Van Meter High School didn’t have a track team when Young was a student there, he developed a consuming interest in high-level track and field competitions.

He has been to several Olympic Games and world track championships, and has made his mark at his college alma mater. A few years ago, when Don Lamberti of Casey’s General Stores Inc. made a major donation to the construction of a recreation center at Buena Vista, Young gave $500,000 to build a six-lane, 200-meter track in that facility. Now he attends every winter when BV hosts the Dennis Young Indoor Classic.

And he runs, too. Young, who has suffered from glaucoma for years and has lost sight in one eye, has had to give up golf and tennis. But when doctors at the Mayo Clinic told him to get more exercise and change his diet, “I said I’ll give up everything but chardonnay,” Young says. And now he runs about four mornings a week, three to five miles at a time.

Young lives three miles from where he grew up, and married his high school sweetheart. Diane, his wife, just opened her own business at West Glen Town Center, a home furnishings store called Trieste. They have three children and a second home in Phoenix.

“I don’t work for the money today; I work for the challenge and the interaction with people,” Young said. A couple of times during his career, he seriously considered going to another company to jump higher up the command ladder. “I would have liked to have had the opportunity to run the place,” he said.

Other job possibilities are still available. “Some businesses have asked me to serve in some role or be on the board,” Young said. “One position would be marketing a financial product, and I’m considering that. I don’t want to be a CFO again.”

So first he plans to unwind for a couple of months, travel with one of his sons and hit a couple of international track meets. After that, it’s up in the air.

“I look back and think about how I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got out of college,” Young said. “That’s about where I am now.”