Pioneering Educator Founded the AARP

"To promote independence, dignity and purpose...."

AARP motto

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That was also the philosophy of Ethel Percy Andrus, California's first female high school principal and the founder of AARP. She lived her retirement the same way she lived her working life -- physically and intellectually active and serving others.

From her determination to help penniless teachers sprang a powerful empire that today claims more than 35 million members -- the second-largest membership organization in the nation after the Catholic Church. When it speaks, politicians listen -- most recently when the group endorsed a controversial new Medicare law, though it quickly lost 20,000 members for doing so.

Andrus was born in San Francisco in 1884. Her family moved to Chicago where her father, George Andrus, studied law. She later described him as "a man who believed everyone should do good somewhere."

After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1903, she taught English and German during the day and devoted evenings and weekends to the poor, teaching in homes where youngsters spent hours threading needles in bad candlelight so that their slightly older sisters could earn more money sewing piecework.

She returned to California in 1910, teaching at Santa Paula High School for a year. In 1911, Manual Arts High School recruited her. She taught there for five years. Her students included Goodwin Knight, who would become California's 31st governor.

In June 1916, at age 32, she became principal at the 2-year-old Abraham Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights. Atop the school's main wrought-iron entrance gate, one word was inscribed: "OPPORTUNITY."

In an era of hard-nosed, gruff male principals, she might have passed for Marian the Librarian. She was a red-haired, bespectacled, soft-spoken educator whose mission was to spare the rod and work with children and parents. She built close relationships with teachers and inspired leadership skills and hope in students at a time when many pupils didn't even reach senior year, let alone collect diplomas.

"When you spent time with Ethel," a teacher at Lincoln recalled in an AARP publication, "you felt you'd had a drink of strong, heady wine."

Although teaching the three R's -- reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic -- was her most important goal, she helped students develop positive self-images and problem-solving skills. In a neighborhood that began as a middle-class, close-knit community of immigrants -- mostly Italian, Irish and German, with a sprinkling of other ethnicities -- she encouraged pride in family heritage.