(Contents: Ethel Percy Andrus, "The Good Samaritan" (Edito...)
Contents: Ethel Percy Andrus, "The Good Samaritan" (Editor's Notebook) "Washington's Farewell to the Nation" Dorothy Svenson, "Why Not Learn a Language?" "Rube Goldberg" Jim Lee, "The Art of Chinese Cooking" "Our Versifying Friends" (Sara E. Armstrong, "Late in Winter"; Mrs. Arminda H. Hedges, "To My Husband"; C. E. Shaw, "Easter"; Mrs. Muriel A. Russell, "Get It in Print"; Bess Hoover Mucker, "How Cum?"; Stella Fisher Burgess, "Sic Semper"; Mrs. Lula E. Gruver, "Welcome Travelers"; Mrs. Charles S. Demarest, "Winter Treasure"; Archer D. Harris, "A Fireplace"; Anna Belle King, "Benedictus"; Daniel Gordon, "Two Magic Gardens"; Clifton Lord, "Look Up While Slowing Down"; Cassie Spencer Payne, "Rhymes on Retirement"; Charles Werner, "The Handy Man") William C. Fitch, "Program Notes and Quotes" "The Steel Museum at Worcester" "Folks in the News" (Carl May, "Glass Bottles Preserve History"; Richard Osterholm, "Oldest Paper 'Boy'?"; "His Hobby Sharpens His Wits"; "Her Art Wins Friends"; Fay Kuhlman, "Happiness Is Keeping Busy"; Violet Moore, "He Brings the South North"; Bert Carlson, "Invented a Snow Scraper"; "Obeys Doctor's Orders to Walk"; "Ex-Cop Clowns for Kids"; Eunice V. Hitner, "An Avid Collector"; Jay Bowles, "Former Slave Is Nation's Oldest Student"; "Wins Blue Ribbons for His Handicraft"; "A Gentleman's Tie Pins") "The Charm behind the Blarney Stone" Ernest Giddings & Alan Mercill, "Social Security Action Imminent" "Medicines: The Growing Worry over 'Side Effects'" Roy L. Swift, "Social Security" "The Treasures of Chesapeake Bay" "Our Members Write" "Shintoism—Undetermined Antiquity to Present Time" Ruth Lana, "Togetherness—the Invisible Ingredient That Makes All AARP Tours So Special!" "Tips Worth Considering" "America's First Western Pioneers—California Missions" "AARP Area Reports" etc.
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Ethel Percy Andrus was born on September 21, 1884 in San Francisco, California, United States, the daughter of George Wallace Andrus, a lawyer, and Lucretia Frances Duke.
When Andrus was an infant, the family moved to Chicago so that her father could continue his legal studies at the University of Chicago. Then, because of her father's failing health, Andrus moved with the family back to California in 1910.
Andrus graduated from Austin High School in 1900 and the University of Chicago (Ph. B. )
She also took courses at Lewis Institute institute and was awarded her B. S. in 1918.
In her spare time, she served as a volunteer at Hull House and at the Chicago Commons, two settlement houses.
She taught for a year at Santa Paula High School and then, from 1911 to 1916, at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, also serving for one year as acting principal. She went to Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles as vice-principal in February 1916 and, the following June, became principal, a position she held for twenty-eight years. Andrus thus became the first woman high school principal in California.
Lincoln was a large urban school with students from varied ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds; it had a high delinquency rate and tension often existed between parents and teachers. Andrus therefore dedicated herself to the twin goals of helping "our many nationalities" to respect "their own roots and the traditions alike of America and the land and faith of their forefathers" and of bringing together the school and community.
She established at Lincoln the Opportunity School for Adults in the evening to serve the immigrant parents of her pupils. This soon developed into a full-fledged adult evening school that offered courses leading to a high school diploma.
In 1940 the Juvenile Court of East Los Angeles awarded a special citation to Andrus and the school for their roles in reducing the rate of juvenile delinquency in the neighborhood. So successful was her attempt to meld school and community that the section of eastern Los Angeles in which the school was located came to be called Lincoln Heights.
In 1940 the National Education Association chose Lincoln as one of the schools to be used as a case study for the textbook Learning Ways of Democracy. Andrus herself returned to school, earning her M. A. in 1928 and her Ph. D. in 1930 from the University of Southern California.
During summer sessions from 1930 to 1940, she taught guidance, educational philosophy, and school administration at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Her career as an educator seemingly ended when she resigned her position as principal of Lincoln in 1944 in order to nurse her invalid mother. In retirement Andrus received a pension of $60 a month. Although she had additional income, she began to wonder how other retired teachers lived. Her position as welfare director of the southern section of the California Retired Teachers Association made her more sharply aware of the problem.
As she began to investigate how different states financed teachers' pensions, it became obvious to her that a national organization was needed. Thus, in 1947 she founded the National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA) and became its president. Besides lobbying across the country for better-funded pension systems, the NRTA published a quarterly journal (beginning in 1950); established a teachers' retirement home (Grey Gables) in Ojai, California (1954); initiated a travel program geared to the needs of the elderly; and opened a mail-order pharmaceutical program to provide prescription medicines at low cost.
The most significant of the NRTA's actions was the introduction of a low-cost health and accident insurance program for those over sixty-five. The pilot program, sponsored by the Continental Casualty Company of New York, was offered nationally in 1956 to NRTA members. The first of its kind, the insurance program quickly became so popular that retired persons from other professions wanted access to it. This led Andrus in 1958 to found the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which was open to all retired people over the age of fifty-five. With Andrus as its president, the AARP extended to its members all the benefits won for teachers through the NRTA. Both organizations became powerful lobbying forces in Congress. In 1961, Andrus formed the Retirement Research and Welfare Association, a nonprofit foundation to channel funds provided by gifts or legacies into research and philanthropy.
That same year she was appointed to the advisory council of the White House Conference on Aging. In 1963 she established the Institute of Life-Time Learning in Washington, D. C. , to offer classes and seminars for senior citizens; other branches were soon opened in California and Florida. She also established and edited the monthly magazine of the AARP, Modern Maturity.
In 1964, at the age of eighty, Andrus still traveled up to 16, 000 miles a month on behalf of the NRTA and the AARP. She continued to oppose mandatory retirement laws and to crusade for wider job opportunities for older people, urging others to follow her own example by embarking on a second career. She died in Long Beach, California.
Andrus is best known for being the first woman high school principal in California and the founder of AARP. Among Andrus' many accomplishments is a stint as a faculty member at Chicago's Lewis Institute and a predecessor of Illinois Institute of Technology. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. In 1995 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.
(Contents: Ethel Percy Andrus, "The Good Samaritan" (Edito...)
Andrus never married.
