The Second Time Around

I recently received an anguished telephone call from a friend, and her first words were: “They got me!” Who, I wondered? Space aliens? The IRS? Wrong! My friend had just received her first complimentary issue of the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). I remembered my own surprise when I first received a copy of that magazine, and asked a friend how these people could possibly have known who I was, much less how old I was. Did they have a network of spies out there ready to prey on people who had reached a certain age? Her answer was that they were using a combination of hard work and modern technology to collect and maintain an up-to-date list that includes the birthday of everyone (or almost everyone) in America. When people on the list are approaching their 50th birthday, they would get the pitch to join up and spend money on the AARP’s various services. Fine, I thought, but I would rather have had a birthday card.

I did wonder, though, if I could find a way to check them out in my own spy-secret way. As an astrologer, of course, all I needed was a date or two, so it didn’t take long to find out that AARP was incorporated on July 1, 1958, by someone named Ethel Percy Andrus, a retired teacher from Glendale, California, who had worked for the