A Mirror of America: Retirees in the Sunshine State

Gary Mormino: Do you remember the classic Seinfeld episode, Jerry is visiting Boca Del Vista, and Morty says, “Hurry up, we have to go to a early bird special.” Jerry looks at his watch and said, “Who eats at 4:30?” Morty says, “Don’t worry, by the time we get served it’ll be 4:45.”

Brian Balogh: Today, about 20% of Florida’s population is 65 or older, also known as senior citizens. Gary Mormino is one of them. He’s lived there for decades and enjoyed a career teaching history and politics at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Gary Mormino: I was teaching in Florida and I stayed in Florida, so I’m not perfect example of a retiree. Lest listeners think I’m spoofing seniors, first of all, I am a senior, but secondly, I am in awe sometimes in studying senior life in Florida.

Brian Balogh: All right, folks. It’s time to roll up the tube socks, bust out the fanny pack, stock up on fiber, because we’re diving into senior life in the Sunshine State.

Gary Mormino: It’s a mirror of America today, retirement in Florida. There are gay senior citizen homes in Florida. There are retirement communities that are Republican and Democratic bastions. It’s an upside-down triangle. Historically societies had lots of kids and very few senior citizens. You have counties in Florida where there are more 75-year-olds and older than 18 and younger. That’s astonishing.

Brian Balogh: The city where I grew up was definitely one of those places Gary is talking about, where the old outnumber the young. I grew up in Coral Gables, outside of Miami. Let me tell you, it was overflowing with seniors. Everybody on my block was retired except my parents. This wasn’t always the case for Coral Gables or for Florida as a whole. Gary says that for a long time in American history, Florida was younger than the rest of the country and wasn’t a very desirable place to be. It was too remote and way too humid.

Gary Mormino: Florida was a place you came in the winter for a few weeks, but no one really took it very seriously, because it was so small. On the eve of World War Two, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the American South.

Brian Balogh: Even before World War Two, back in the 1920s, the tide in Florida started to change.

Gary Mormino: The ’20s was this magical decade when Florida comes of age. All the qualities we associate with Florida today, its zaniness, the ’20s is Florida makes a tremendous demographic leap, and for the first time in Florida history, the future is going to be tied not to the panhandle or North Florida, where cotton and the Black Belt had been, but Central and Southern Florida. Orlando, Miami Beach, Palm Beach, Boca Raton, St. Petersburg, eventually Naples will be the future load stars of Florida.

Brian Balogh: We know that Social Security started during the New Deal in 1935, really takes off in the ’40s, in the ’50s. I got to guess that had a lot to do with the changing fortunes, if you’ll excuse the pun, of elderly people.

Gary Mormino: The role of the federal government in shaping both Florida and the United States is extraordinary. You think about it now, Social Security has been so popular, I believe Barry Goldwater was the last presidential candidate to even consider getting rid of Social Security.

Brian Balogh: Now every politician should know that you don’t mess with senior citizens’ benefits, but that doesn’t mean every city in Florida has been the most welcoming to its older residents.

Gary Mormino: St. Petersburg, where I live, may be the most famous retirement community in America in the 20th century. In 1916 the city fathers installed green benches, this certain color of green. You have these old photographs of thousands of senior citizens reading their newspaper in the morning. The problem with this for St. Petersburg is by the 1960s those senior citizens had become poor. They even called a district around downtown a gerontopolis. The city fathers wanted a new hipper St. Petersburg, and they removed the green benches in 1967, figuring if we remove the green benches, the old folks will move away. It was a public relations disaster.

Brian Balogh: Besides removing those green benches, did St. Petersburg do anything else in a self-conscious way to change its image?

Gary Mormino: What they might have done is nothing, in terms of promoting St. Petersburg as a senior mecca. What’s interesting about it is also the culture of that life in St. Petersburg ’30s through the ’60s. Shuffleboard courts, cafeterias. Many of the seniors had come for the winter. Not everyone stayed year-round, in that age before air conditioning.

Brian Balogh: Tell me about air conditioning. What difference did that make?

Gary Mormino: If you had been in a Southern community before the 1950s, there would have been islands of air conditioning in the best movie theater in town if there was a department store in town, but air conditioning was simply too expensive. Almost no individual homes had air conditioning. The great breakthrough is the 1950s when the Carrier window unit is introduced. It was expensive by the relative cost of living in the ’50s, but it certainly was the grand ushering in of this revolution. The first U.S. Census to enumerate air conditioning is 1960. In 1960 only one in five homes in Florida had any air conditioning at all, so 20% is not exactly a revolution, but when the price dropped for window units, and more and more units were being installed with pole air conditioning, it took off in the ’60s. ’60s is really the decade of air conditioning.

Brian Balogh: What were the advertising slogans that lured so many people to the Sunshine State?

Gary Mormino: The senior citizens’ communities. By the way, we had to invent a whole new lexicon to describe this. Active retirement community. If someone had told you in 1920, “I’m going to move to an active retirement community,” you would’ve thought they were out of their mind. This was across Florida, not just in the South, Naples, Fort Meyers. I used to deliver newspapers on Sunday mornings. Those papers weighed about six pounds. They were hundreds and hundreds of real estate ads for people to move to Florida. Cape Coral may be the best example here. Cape Coral gave away homes on The Price Is Right and Truth and Consequences. If they saw you gawking in Miami Beach, they’d come up and say, “How’d you like a free helicopter ride or a plane ride and a steak dinner?” They’d fly over Cape Coral, which is in Lee County, on the Gulf Coast, and then they’d land and they’d put the husband and wife in an isolation booth. They had secret listening devices to find out who was holding out. They’d say, “Wouldn’t you love to retire here in 20 years for this kind of life?” “Yes, we would, but … ” “All you need, $10 down. $10 down, $10 a month.” They’d say, “I forgot my checkbook.” They had a vault with every blank check company in America, every blank bank.

Brian Balogh: Let me ask you about retirees and politics. We know that this is a very big force in Florida politics, probably other states as well by now. How would you sum up the emerging role of the elderly or the retired in Florida politics?

Gary Mormino: They vote early and often. No politician takes them lightly. They punch heavier than their weight. Let’s put it this way. I think the figure I just saw was, this was in the 1990s, the senior vote was around 28%, and their numbers were about 17 or 18%. They’re much more likely to vote than an 18 to 21-year-old. You could make an argument also, even though not every retiree is a Republican, but the modern Republican Party was built on retirees’ backs. It had began in St. Petersburg in the 1930s. Retirees from the Midwest would come with their Midwestern isolationism. I think it was the late ’30s, St. Petersburg and Pinellas County became a Republican bulwark. Then the first modern Republican Congressman was elected from St. Petersburg in 1954, Bill Kramer. They helped elect the first Republican governor in Florida in 1966, Claude Kirk. Seniors enjoy the political fray in Florida. Many of them vote also in New York and Florida. They just found out that the governor of Vermont was a registered voter in Florida.

Brian Balogh: Wow. Gary, besides growing up surrounded by the elderly people, the other thing I remember about growing up in South Florida was Castro and the influx of Cubans to Miami. I’d never really thought about what happens when those Cubans who came in the 1960s begin to retire.

Gary Mormino: 1959 is one of those watershed years in Florida history. January 1st, ’59, Fidel had taken over, and the first exodus begins. Almost all that crowd is young or middle-aged, classic immigration profiles, except when you’re fleeing a Communist state, some elderly did come, but if you think about it, those young Cubans who left in 1959, 1965, are now in their 60s and 70s. In the 1965 Immigration Act, a major piece of legislation, the most important piece of legislation since the Immigration Restriction Acts of the 1920s, had a revolutionary impact upon Hispanics and Asians coming to America in general, and Florida in particular. Cubans had their own most favorable nation legislation, which helped them particularly bring their grandparents to America. This is unusual in American history. There’s a golden law, grandparents don’t immigrate. It’s the young kids and the sons and daughters who immigrate, but not the grandparents. That changed in 1965.

Brian Balogh: Stepping back, how would you say that retirees have shaped Florida over the last 75 years?

Gary Mormino: In some ways Florida is a testing case, is a proving ground for the rest of America. The world and America will soon be Florida. Low birth rates, anti-immigration, Florida is a test case. No society has ever faced these demographic conditions, where you have a super abundance of senior people and relatively few kids. There’s not a historical lesson to be learned from the past on this, I think. It’s a mirror of society. If there’s one theme I’d like to lead with it’s that you’ve got Republican and you have Democratic seniors, you have liberal, conservative, you have gay seniors condos now. It’s a mirror of society.

Brian Balogh: Gary Mormino is Professor of History and Politics at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He’s also the author of Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.