Her name was Ida May Fuller, a retired legal secretary from Vermont, and on this day in 1940 she made history by going to her mailbox, making today
NATIONAL SOCIAL SECURITY CHECK DAY!
The mail in question was Social Security Check # 00-000-001, in the amount of $20.22, which Ms. Fuller would collect monthly until her death at age 100 in 1975.
She received cost-of-living raises, so that she collected an average of $54.50 a month for a total of $22,888.92. Her payroll contributions had been just $24.75, made over the 3 years prior to her retirement in 1939.
Before Social Security was enacted in America, most senior citizens were poverty-stricken; workers who could no longer work, with many of them financially dependent upon their extended families. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1932 at the height of The Great Depression, he saw “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”
He wasn’t the first politician to take note of America’s inequities, but this son of wealth and privilege did something unprecedented, he set out to do something about it. In the process, FDR lifted millions of Americans out of dead-end poverty with a series of laws and programs that still protect us to this day, and created the Social Security Administration to guarantee American workers a dignified retirement after a lifetime of work.
It was a recognition of their contributions to America, and a promise that we would not cast them aside like so many broken tools when they could no longer produce.
30 years later, President Lyndon Johnson would complete the job of caring for our seniors with Medicare, ensuring they would have the medical care they needed without bankrupting them. As a result, senior citizens are today a prosperous, vital demographic and major contributors to our economy.
•Suggested Activities: Visiting Grandma and Grandpa in the home they were not forced to sell.