At 50, AARP Enters Its Golden Years

"Old was in," Dychtwald said. "People wanted to look old. They all had white wigs on. The idea was that the older one appeared, the more powerful you were. Flash-forward to today: Everyone dyes their hair and freezes their foreheads."

A turning point, he said, was the Industrial Revolution, which propelled new generations to pursue their dreams in the cities and leave their elders in the countryside. Another was the Roaring Twenties, when Americans grew enchanted by images of the young and restless dancing their nights away. Elvis and JFK, among others, helped seal the deal in later decades.

"The dark side was that if young was good, old was bad," Dychtwald said. "Older people got swept to the sidelines. They were moved out of the workforce. They were cast aside."

In the 1940s, Ethel Percy Andrus, a high school principal in California, reached the end of her 41-year career and discovered that her monthly pension check amounted to a grand total of $60.

How did retired teachers survive? she wondered.

Discovering that no group existed to fight for their interests, Andrus founded the National Retired Teachers Association. Eleven years later, she sought a broader constituency, forming AARP to help older Americans obtain health insurance and to agitate on their behalf.

"As it is," Andrus once told an interviewer, "when you leave a job, they often give you a gold watch and all you can do is look at it and count the hours until you die. Yet think of all the grand things we can do that youth can't."

Nearly a decade later, AARP claimed almost 1 million members. In 1983, the group dropped its membership age from 55 to 50; its ranks soon grew to 20 million.

But there were challenges. Older members were dying off and AARP had to figure out ways to recruit their replacements, the baby boomers who were reaching their 50s. As a group, boomers were elusive, reluctant to join anything or to think of themselves as aging, let alone retiring.

So AARP airbrushed its name.

Robert Binstock, a professor of age, health and society at Case Western Reserve University, recalled that AARP's leader at the time, Horace Deets, suggested that the reason for the change was to "make the organization more international and get 'American' out of it."

"He came from the old tradition and didn't want them to think they were rejecting the older members," Binstock said. "It was kind of laughable."