Golden years

It was on an auto trip to Miami back in '65 when Clifford and Grace Beaumont first spotted the billboard for Del Webb's Sun City on U.S. 301.

Relatives in California had excitedly taken them on a tour of a Sun City there, and they marveled at the place. So perfectly clean, so beautiful, so not-New York. It looked like a fairy-tale land, a concept so new as to make the mind reel. No children, no work, no worries? Imagine!

On a whim, the couple pulled off the highway to look at Florida's version. It was 11 a.m. By 1 p.m., they had bought a little ranch house on a tidy street dotted with freshly planted palm trees, surrounded by cow pastures and tomato fields. It cost about $11,000, and they, like most residents then and now, paid cash.

You had to be 50 to buy there, but the rules were stretched for the Beaumonts because the mister was 49 and a half.

Now 95, Clifford Beaumont still considers it a stellar idea.

"Mother and I agree on this — we agree pert near all the time anyway — that it was wonderful to leave all the hustle and bustle that was driving us wild," he says.

Although there are older residents in Sun City Center (the "Center" part was added after developers learned Florida already had a Sun City), the Beaumonts have lived in the retirement community longer than anyone else.

Today, they will wave from a golf cart, the iconic mode of transportation in town, in a parade to kick off a yearlong celebration of the community's 50th anniversary.

As the Beaumonts enjoy their decades-long good decision to spend their golden years taking it easy in fairy land, others puzzle over how to keep the '60s-style community viable and appealing to aging boomers. Billboards on Florida's highways still tout the good life — usually personified by a graying golfer and his beaming blond wife — but fancier retirement communities beckon today's retirees.

You can call the Beaumonts charming, sweet and blessed with a gentle humor nurtured through 75 years of a happy marriage; the word "revolutionary" hardly springs to mind. Yet their decision to buy a home far from family and to plan for a period of life without working was as radical as they come.

Even at the time the Beaumonts left New York and their farm supply business, a healthy, lengthy retirement was an alien concept. People usually worked until they died, often at young ages. When they became too old or ill, they moved in with their children, likely in the same town in which they were born.

Better medical care brought longer lives, and Social Security, pension plans and an increase in mobility after World War II led to the idea that one's final years could mean fun in the sun, far from home, with others the same age.

Wiley Mangum, professor emeritus in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida, specialized in analyzing retirement trends, first researching California's Sun City in the 1960s.

He wondered whether he would find scores of older people sick of palm trees and pining for home. He did not.

"At first, leisure-oriented retirement communities were very controversial," he says. "People had this unrealistic, romanticized idea of older people sharing wisdom and integrating into their communities."

Anthropologist Margaret Mead tsk-tsked over what she dubbed "golden ghettos," and Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, derisively called the communities "playpens for the elderly."

No one even knew what to call the new class of healthy older adults. Developer Webb, then owner of the New York Yankees and builder of Las Vegas' first casino/hotel, recognized a new market for "senior citizens" ready to shuck work and pick up their golf clubs in a temperate climate.

He bought ads on the "Lawrence Welk" television show and in Ladies Home Journal, and later, billboards went up featuring mustachioed movie star Cesar Romero praising the new lifestyle of Sun City.

When Florida's version opened in late December 1961, about 41,000 people showed up to take a look.

They liked what they saw.

Many still do.

Kris Collett, 59, first visited Sun City Center when her parents moved there from Pittsburgh in 1987.

"I said, 'You guys have hit the jackpot!' " she recalls. "The pools, the water, the neighbors were so nice, and you didn't have enough time in the day to do all the activities they had. I was so impressed."

When her mother died, Collett, then 51, moved near her father and stayed. He has since married a woman he met in the community. After Collett's first husband died, she remarried and persuaded her new husband to move there.

"It's like summer camp," says Collett, a retired executive of a health care company. "The only other time when you're with only people your same age is when you're in college, and even then, you still had to work."

The Sun City Center Community Association keeps tabs on those who come and go. About three-quarters of residents are referred by friends or family; about a third are veterans. Fewer hail from Florida, with most from the Northeast and Midwest. Census data report 3,222 widows to 710 widowers, leading to perhaps apocryphal tales of women scoping out funerals for widowers in need of a casserole.

Although reluctant residents finally allowed a funeral home to open (with some vowing never to patronize it), no one seems to want a cemetery. Cremation remains a popular option with residents far removed from their hometowns. Nursing homes and continuing-care residences, also meeting initial resistance, have become a viable option for residents hoping to remain near friends and determined not to become a burden to their children.

Residents, a majority of them Republicans, are proud they are able to staff their own security force and rescue squad with volunteers. Politicians flock to Sun City Center to campaign, knowing these residents vote religiously.

"People don't come here expecting the government to entertain them," Beaumont says.

Kathy Sager, 68, formerly a pastoral counselor from New York, is president of the Sun City Aquasizers, one of about 150 clubs catering to a variety of interests. Among them are the Accordion Club, the Sew-N-Sews, the Jazzmatazz Dance Club, the Bunka Art Club and Pebble Beach Lawn Bowling.

Sager says she often revels in the scenery visible from the pool as she exercises.

"I look up at the palm trees and I think, 'Thank God, I live here.' It's like a little toy town, with its golf carts. We feel like we're in paradise."

Collett also finds the 1960s, Old Florida-style charming.

Sager says she and her husband checked out a number of retirement communities before choosing Sun City Center.

"We looked up and down the freeway and saw lots of big, fancy entryways," she says. "But they didn't have nearly the amenities we do, like all the clubs. When you first drive in here, you see the bungalows, but you keep driving and you see decade after decade as the houses change and get nicer."

Many in town joke that the unimpressive bungalows, with tiny square footage and jalousie windows, should be designated the "historic district." One of the activities in Sun City's 50th celebration is a tour of homes June 11, featuring one house from each decade.

Professor Mangum says expectations were lower in the '60s. For many, a Florida vacation meant staying in a trailer camp, as they were called. Even a tiny home felt luxurious if it was without wheels.

Those early days were interesting, says Grace Beaumont, 92.

"It was so clean, it almost was laughable, because when one of us had a leaf to blow down in the yard, a neighbor would call us to tell us to pick it up," she says. "We could only hang out our laundry one day a week."

But it was so much nicer than the family feed mill and farm supply place, with the radio constantly squawking, the phone jangling and noisy trucks pulling in and out.

At first, the Beaumonts split their time between New York and Florida.

"One night, we were sitting on the back lanai, and it was so quiet and so beautiful and peaceful, I asked him, 'What are we still doing up there?' "

That's when they decided to make Sun City Center their permanent home. Their three daughters were grown, and only one remained in college. Still, it was a huge decision.

"It was hard for me to leave my kids," she says. The youngest daughter later transferred to the University of Tampa, and a boyfriend flew her down in a plane that touched down on Webb's landing strip, just south of State Road 674, still the main drag through town. Mother worried ceaselessly until daughter was on the ground. Grace Beaumont recalls seeing a number of planes lined up, facing Kings Inn, an upscale restaurant Webb and his cronies liked to fly to for breakfast.

The community was shocked when the institution burned down in 1971.

A lack of places for a nice meal continues to rankle residents. Ann Mangum, who moved to neighboring community Kings Point with husband Wiley in 2002, says the area needs a facelift.

"It can be dreary," she says. "The 1960s-era stuff was less glamorous."

Again, expectations were lower then. A Denny's or a Bob Evans might work fine for folks who need a sound meal at early bird prices, Wiley Mangum says, but a nicer restaurant with a bar would attract upscale and younger retirees.

His wife would like to see a few nice clothing shops. The area offerings are mostly strip centers, pharmacies and dollar stores.

"It can be kind of depressing to shop in Walmart," says Ann Mangum, a former teacher in her early 80s. "I see these older women who are so bent over. I never walk with as good of posture as I do coming out of Walmart."

Bob Black, 81, and a former journalist, serves as vice president of the community association's board of directors. He says everyone recognizes the need to aggressively market Sun City Center and Kings Point to boomers. His association is joining with Minto Communities, the area's new developer, and GolfLink, which has taken over its golf courses, to try to determine how to do that. Both companies are based in Canada and plan to market there.

In an area in which most pay cash for their homes, the real estate crash brought few foreclosures. Construction continues in Kings Point, and the new, upscale Renaissance neighborhood in Sun City Center is designed to compete with other pricy Florida developments for wealthy boomers who want lots of square footage and a three-car garage.

The Mangums moved to the area in 2002 when the professor, now in his late 70s, decided that because he had spent years writing about retirement communities, it was time to "put my money where my mouth — or my pen — was."

Although many move there for the clubs and social life, the Mangums have found satisfaction in staying in and reading. There's no pressure to join up, they say, even though their neighbors were gracious and welcoming. They also teach courses at a local church.

The Beaumonts find themselves alone most of the time now. Their daughters take turns caring for them.

"When we came here, we were all pretty much the same age," Clifford Beaumont says.

Not so any longer, and the couple say they have little in common with the 55-year-olds moving in now.

Grace remembers rollicking parties, including one in which heavy rain drove picnickers inside her small home.

"I think we had an even better time then," she recalls.

But living into your 90s means losing your friends, one by one. Residents often joke that their next move will be to a little plot of land in this cemetery or that. Three generations have come and gone on the Beaumonts' street.

"Having been in the business world," Clifford says, "the quietness is nice. It's fine to let the world go by. This has been a wonderful place to be."

dkoehn@tampatrib.com

(813) 295-8264