A Champion for the Aged : Agency Director Solves Individual Problems, Fights for Legislation

The voice on the other end of the line was a cry for help--from a desperate, frightened, 75-year-old man trapped in a financial and bureaucratic maze.

He and his wife had lived for years in their comfortably middle-class Orange County home. Now he was alone. He had put his wife, incapacitated by illness, into a nursing home.

Then another disaster struck: The $1,800-a-month cost of the long-term care wasn’t covered by their Medicare or private insurance. And he was going broke, their life savings in danger of vanishing.

Finally, told by other senior citizens that the Area Agency on Aging might be able to help, he called that office, Orange County’s official coordinator of senior citizen programs.

And he found a sympathetic ear.

In fact, agency director Peggy Weatherspoon, who took the call herself, remembers the man’s financial plight as the kind that could be resolved.

Under a new state law, the couple could divide their assets. The husband was protected from becoming impoverished, while the wife’s share could be used to pay nursing bills until she dropped to the poverty level and became eligible for Medi-Cal coverage.

Even so, this case, was “a real heartbreaker,” Weatherspoon says, one that typifies the approach the Area Agency on Aging takes in all its cases.

Quite simply: “We try to give them help, of course, and if we can’t, we try to find someone who can. You never turn your back on the people. You never hang up on them. You listen. You care. You go to bat for them. We’re there as their friends--and their voices to the rest of society.”

As director of the Area Agency on Aging the past eight years, Weatherspoon, 41, is at the cutting edge of senior programs and activism in the county.

The agency, by its directly administered or contracted services, reaches up to 33,000 seniors a year through programs involving hot meals, shared housing, senior day care, transportation and independent living. The projects are considered models by state officials and others in the field.

And Weatherspoon, known for her advocacy, enthusiasm and administrative tact, is highly regarded by leaders in the county’s senior community, including the agency’s own Senior Citizens Advisory Council.

Since she entered the field 13 years ago as a graduate student in USC’s nationally respected Andrus School of Gerontology, she has witnessed dramatic expansion in militant senior organizations, social research on aging and the elderly, and the nationwide network of 670 federally sponsored Area Agencies on Aging.

Demographic realities are one obvious reason. Americans are living longer, and the post-World War II baby boom generation, now in their 30s and 40s, will be confronting their own old age.

Weatherspoon cites the latest nationwide projections by a team of USC and National Institute of Aging researchers:

- In 1985 the average life expectancy was 71.2 for men and 78.2 for women. By 2040 the predicted averages are 85.9 for men and 91.6 for women.

- Also by 2040, the 65-and-older population will be 87 million, triple the current total. Seniors may then compose 20% to 25% of the overall U.S. population; the 1980 figure was 11.3%.

The Orange County statistics are just as striking, Weatherspoon says. The 60-and-over population is now 325,125, or 14.3% of the total county population; the 1980 figure was 221,584, or 11.5%. The projections by the year 2020: 767,465, or 25.2%.

This will mean, Weatherspoon says, a new kind of population phenomenon in America--”one that runs counter to all those myths about ‘old age’ and the youth mentality that still dominates our society.”

A sweeping retooling of American society, she says, will be in order to meet new demands in housing, employment, consumer and leisure needs of the vast “healthly, fully active” senior population.

But the rising political clout of seniors, she adds, will also be required to press for a “massive regrouping of public and private resources” to meet long-term care needs--whether in facilities or in the home--of chronically ill seniors.

Thus, if the past few decades have reflected America’s baby boom era, she says, then the next few decades will be marked by yet another trend--the senior boom.

It is ironic that Weatherspoon, herself a baby boomer, had started out with the common stereotypes.

“I grew up with the old myths, that being old always meant being decrepit and doomed to a dead-end existence,” says Weatherspoon, who was born in Tulare, one of five children in a San Joaquin Valley farming family.

“I only saw the down side of aging, like seeing older people in restaurants being spoon-fed. I was horrified that this was the way all of us would end up. It never occurred to me that there was this other side--the quality of life, dignity and vitality that older people can enjoy.”

Then Weatherspoon, a psychology major at Cal State Dominquez Hills, was shaken by an incident that was to change her life personally and professionally.

“Someone in the (college) office was looking at this magazine cartoon--mocking an elderly couple trying to have sex in bed,” she says. “Everyone began to snicker--including me.

“But this other office worker, a woman in her 60s, burst into tears. She said, ‘Why do you young people think this is so damn funny!’ ”

Deeply moved, Weatherspoon, who had been thinking of entering the child psychology field, from then on focused on studying the elderly, even writing a class paper on their sexuality.

It was her field work as a USC graduate intern--including a project that took her to the senior hotels in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles--that most changed her attitudes. “I met seniors who lived in tiny rooms with just a bed and a hot plate--people who were alone and suffering from physical and social hardships. But they still had a passion for life, were still proud of their independence. They were not people to feel sorry for.”

She became an Orange County gerontologist in 1976 and then a mental health specialist on alcohol abuse--before being hired in 1980 to direct the county’s Area Agency on Aging. Today, in her $58,000-a-year post, she oversees 30 staff aides and 24 contracted private providers.

Weatherspoon says the agency, currently a $9-million operation supported mostly by federal money as well as state, county and private funds, offers programs that emphasize reaching the “economically and socially needy”--such as the impoverished, the “home-bound fragile” and ethnic minorities.

The Senior Citizens Information and Referral Office, the agency’s telephone service in the county complex at 1300 S. Grand Ave. in Santa Ana, handles up to 1,200 calls a month, chiefly for information on medical assistance, bus services, affordable housing and home-maker aides. (Information office: (714) 567-7500, central county; (714) 220-0366, west, and (714) 768-5615, south.)

Other services directly administered by the agency include coordinating 15 “shared housing” programs, which have placed nearly 900 applicants this year; a “case management” program in which a team of professional aides monitors meals, doctor visits and related functions for 200 “highly fragile” seniors, and an ombudsman service to handle referrals and complaints about nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities.

The agency’s largest program is the hot-meal service contracted with three private organizations--including the widely known Feedback Foundation--providing up to 6,000 meals a day at senior centers and for shut-in residents. Other contracted services include bus transportation, senior day-care centers, employment referrals and legal assistance.

Contract organizations and other leaders in the senior community maintain that agency-affiliated programs are among the best in the state.

Veteran senior advocates like Shirley Cohen, who directs the Feedback Foundation, credit this in part to “a supportive countywide network,” including the County Board of Supervisors, which governs the Area Agency on Aging, and the agency’s Senior Citizens Advisory Council.

Weatherspoon also gets her share of the credit. “She’s a very effective communicator and director,” Cohen says. “She has the empathy (for seniors) and professional background. She gets along with everybody.”

H. Ross Miller, the advisory council’s vice president, whose ties with the county agency date back to its founding in 1974, puts it this way: “Peggy’s an outstanding, very warm kind of person. We’re lucky to have her. And she really goes out and fights for seniors.”

One afternoon, Weatherspoon was between meetings in the day’s round. She had returned the evening before from another trip to Sacramento to press for new senior-related legislation.

Naturally, her thoughts were on the latest battles: the pursuit of more government financing for new or expanded programs and the lobbying for federal long-term-care insurance that would cover the overwhelming costs of nursing and similar facilities.

The fight goes on, too, she says, to shatter old myths. “People still think most seniors are senile and completely helpless. The truth is that only 5% are senile--and about 20% are after age 85.” She turned to a window sill, where she keeps her photographic mementos. Next to a snapshot of her husband, Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard L. Weatherspoon, is a photo of her with her advocacy idol, Claude Pepper, the late Florida congressman.

Pepper, who died in May at age 88 after being hospitalized for treatment of cancer, was the most celebrated legislative champion of senior citizen causes, including attempts to expand Medicare coverage to include long-term care.

“Claude Pepper was a perfect role model for all of us,” Weatherspoon says, “the personification of a senior who had not lost his dignity or mental vitality, who maintained his quality of life.”

And Pepper, whom she met when he visited Orange County in 1984, was a special inspiration to her as an advocate, she says softly. “To me, he was a fighter.”