AARP's hospitality center in St. Petersburg played an important role in the association's early history. 1961 photo from 'Modern Maturity' magazine, now known as 'AARP The Magazine.' — AARP

En español | From AARP's beginnings in the late 1950s to its ongoing Drive to End Hunger, Florida has loomed large in AARP's history.

See also: AARP history.

AARP's founder, Ethel Percy Andrus, chartered the organization in Washington, D.C., on July 1, 1958. Within a few months, she opened a Hospitality Center in downtown St. Petersburg to assist Northern retirees seeking a warm, friendly place to spend the winter.

"She wanted a place where she knew a lot of people, particularly up north, would want to come," said Jeff Johnson, interim AARP Florida director. "It's a really cool part of the history."

Early issues of AARP's Modern Maturity magazine promoted St. Petersburg as an ideal place for retirees seeking winter warmth, encouraging them to visit the Hospitality Center. The center arranged lodging, social events, tours and lectures and offered a place to relax and meet interesting people.

The Hospitality Center played a key role in AARP's early growth. "In the first seven months of 1960, well over 3,000 men and women became AARP members at the Center," Modern Maturity reported in its August-September 1960 issue.

The Hospitality Center added a pharmacy in January 1960, about the same time AARP launched its mail-order prescription service in Washington. The Florida operation subsequently added a mail-order prescription service of its own. Before the end of the year, the pharmacy had become so popular that AARP had to triple its space.

"They had roughly four to five pharmacists that worked the counter to the walk-in pharmacy, and then they had probably six to eight pharmacists that filled prescriptions for the mail-order pharmacy," said Lynn Magnusson, 47, AARP Florida senior operations administrator and former secretary to the pharmacy manager.

The Hospitality Center closed in the early 1970s, and the pharmacy closed in 1996, but their legacy lives on as a rich part of AARP's history in Florida.

Today's AARP Florida is still focused on services that benefit its nearly 2.7 million members, including job training and referral services to prospective employers. The AARP Foundation's WorkSearch program trains lower-income people and places them in nonprofit and government jobs to gain work skills they need to move into better-paying jobs in the private sector. Dave Bruns, AARP Florida communications manager, said the WorkSearch program's 74 percent placement rate in Florida last year was the best in the nation.

AARP Florida also sponsored four career fairs at various locations last year, attracting 600 to 1,200 participants to each event.

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