AARP founder had an eager audience in St. Petersburg

As a St. Petersburg Times reporter from 1948 to 1965, Jerry Blizin covered some of Pinellas County's biggest stories.

She was a stately woman whose glasses and long dress marked her as a career educator. But on her trips to St. Petersburg in the 1950s, Ethel Percy Andrus was recruiting members for her fledgling retirement organizations, which pledged to provide health insurance, discount medicines and other benefits years before Medicare was enacted.

Andrus was a native Californian who taught for 41 years and became the first woman in her home state to be named a high school principal. She retired at 60 to take care of her ailing mother, but she nurtured a dream of providing health care to others in her profession.

In 1947, she founded the National Retired Teachers Association and reportedly canvassed 30 insurance companies before finding one that would take on retired teachers. By 1958, NRTA had morphed into the American Association of Retired Persons, which served retirees older than 55 regardless of profession.

Today, AARP is known only by its initials. With 39 million members, it provides a variety of services and is the biggest lobby for seniors in the country. There is a chapter in every state, and AARP the Magazine, which Andrus created as Modern Maturity, claims the largest circulation in the land. The entry age for members is now 50. Its pharmacy services control 10 percent of the mail-order market. (Disclosure: I have been a member since 1981.)

Back in the '50s, Andrus started holding organizational meetings in the oldest building in the city, the Detroit Hotel at 215 Central Ave., then a favorite site for civic group meetings. Andrus knew St. Petersburg was loaded with retirees, of course. There was a strong need for helping retired civil servants in particular because most weren't eligible for Social Security and lived on fixed pensions.

The Times sent me to cover one of these meetings, although news about the organization usually was covered by women and confined to the so-called women's pages.

The meeting I attended was not particularly noteworthy. As I recall, I was the only man in the crowded meeting room. The questions for Andrus varied from the technical to the personal, including "what did you teach?" She answered that she taught English and German, but that she had been a principal from 1916 until her retirement. That prompted a buzz among the women. Why, I don't know, but I couldn't help thinking that outside of nursing, women of her generation had few career opportunities beyond teaching. So serving nearly 30 years as a principal must have seemed remarkable.

Andrus knew her market. At that time, the proportion of people in St. Petersburg 65 and older was 22.2 percent — nearly three times the national average. By October 1959, AARP and NRTA had an office a few doors from the Detroit Hotel at 139 Central Ave. Margaret Stine, a retired Pinellas County teacher and principal of Lakeview Elementary, was the first director.

The office, called the Hospitality Center, added a Retired Persons Pharmacy in 1960. AARP touted St. Petersburg as a good place to retire, and the center welcomed seniors, dispensing advice, arranging lectures and tours and helping visitors find housing. Members paid an annual fee of $2. They paid for health insurance separately, but had to be 65 to qualify. They got other good deals, like 25 percent off on medicines and medical supplies. AARP even offered bargains on overseas travel packages. According to the Times, a 30-day, all-expenses-paid European trip was available for $900.

Andrus was 75 in 1959 when she came from California to visit the Hospitality Center. In 1966, she participated in a three-way telephone conference on seniors' problems that included Esther Peterson, then an adviser to the president on consumer affairs, and Stine, the local AARP director.

When she died the next year, her legacy was the potent national organization that today has nearly 2.7 million members in Florida.

Information from the May 2011 AARP Bulletin was used in this report. Jerry Blizin, who lives in Tarpon Springs, can be reached at jbliz3@knology.net.