One Foot in St. Petersburg
It is morning in St. Petersburg, another perfect day, and since it is getting on toward the 1st of November the downtown hotels and rooming houses are gearing up for the arrival of the snowbirds. Black maids from the Gas House area are lugging mops and buckets into the winter wings of the Hotel Ten Eyck and the Detroit, the Deermont, the Cordova and the Randolph, airing the tiny, neat rooms after the long, dull, torrid Gulf summer; putting sheets on the hard, single beds; Ajaxing the washbowls and the toilets down the hall; sweeping dust from beneath the painted bureaus and the straight-backed chairs
Up the street from the Detroit, the Fern Grill Fruit Company has reopened for the old folks who can afford to send Christmas baskets of oranges to their kids back in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Syracuse, where it’s already topcoat weather. The chairs on the patio of the Detroit and out front of the Ponce de Leon are being taken by women with fidgety hands and old men with dark glasses and the sucked-in lips that go with toothless gums and a three-day stubble of beard because they forget to shave; just as so many of them forget to change their socks and underwear, living alone; and may, slipping a little toward the end, forget for a moment where they live.
At 11:00 or so, they’ll ease themselves up and start for the center of town, past the green quiet of Williams Park where the best benches are taken by the bums, past the jewelers with signs in their windows saying, ANTIQUE JEWELRY BOUGHT AND SOLD, past the post office with its banks of boxes, the little windows snow-flecked once a month with Social Security checks. In the heat of the day they move slowly on up First Avenue to the Driftwood Cafeteria, big as a hockey rink. Inside they can get fillet of sole for 89 cents, liver and onions for 99 cents, pork chop on dressing for $1.09.
Another perfect day – the temperature around 70, the sky a rich blue as brilliant as porcelain, the sun just strong enough to stir a sluggish circulation. Life of a sort is returning to downtown St. Petersburg, where every other dollar comes from a Social Security check, and where you can get your blood pressure measured on the street for 50 cents, and where the traffic lights are slow because the streets are wide and it takes a long time for old folks to cross on crutches or aluminum walkers, and where the list of funeral notices in the morning St. Petersburg Times is twice as long as the list of births.
There are 100,000 men and women over 65 in St. Petersburg, according to the city’s managers, who appreciate the money they spend but who are sensitive about the city’s reputation as a way place for “the newlywed and the nearly dead,” an anteroom to the Great Beyond. A few years ago the city got rid of the green benches that lined the streets for the convenience of the old and the tired – preferring to project itself as a fun-in-the-sun city on the go. It didn’t work, of course. St. Petersburg has been the retirement capital of the world ever since the railroad pushed down the peninsula from Tampa around the turn of the century. A local pharmacist energetically promoted the railhead town as “the sunshine city,” an ideal spot for those who could no longer take the cold and the ice of less temperate zones, and ever since the annual migration of the snowbirds has been the bedrock of the local economy.
Not long ago, the city managers relented and put back some of the benches. It’s a quiet, clean, uncrowded place and the pace is easy but there is a sameness to the days – you don’t notice the change in the seasons, and the year or five years or 20 years between retirement and death can pass with the fitful emptiness of a summer afternoon.
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Gladys Betty has got a problem. She can’t seem to live on $148 a month, which is what her Social Security check comes to. Now her hearing is beginning to go and she has discovered that Medicare does not cover certain prosthetics, a word she never ran across before. False teeth and hearing aids are prosthetics that are not covered. Mrs. Betty doesn’t know what to do, so she is waiting in the annex of the St. Petersburg Municipal Building to see Constance Rudd, who runs the city’s Office on Aging. Mrs. Rudd, who is about the same age as Mrs. Betty, is telling a visitor about the 50 or 60 separate and distinct programs, private and public, federal, state and local, which attempt to meet the needs of the aged in Pinellas County. There is Transportation of the Elderly (TOTE) and Meals on Wheels, which brings one hot meal a day to shutins, and the day-care center on South 4th Street, where people can leave problem parents, and on and on.
“I’ve been interested in gerontology since I was in my 20s,” says Mrs. Rudd, a neat, trim woman with a natural sweetness of manner, an expressive face and gold-rimmed glasses which give her an air of total candor.
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