The origin, program, and early years of UNT's Center for Studies in Aging must be viewed in context of a unique set of political, professional, and academic factors that existed in the mid and late 1960s and early 1970s. The critical political factor was the passage in 1965 of the Older Americans Act. Title V of the act authorized the support of training for persons to work with the elderly, which included program planning and administration. The director of the Title V program in the Administration on Aging (AoA), which administered the Older Americans Act, was Clark Tibbitts, a distinguished pioneer in gerontology, who had long advocated the inclusion of gerontology in curricula in higher education, particularly at the graduate level. The policies he developed under Title V encouraged the inclusion of gerontology in established degree programs (e.g., public administration, social work, recreation) but were also receptive to the concept of degrees in gerontology. Another important facet of those policies was the priority assigned to training for the administration of programs in aging, the few that then existed and the many that were foreseen. The inclusion of "retirement housing" among those programs was to prove crucial to CSA's development.

     At the time of the passage of the Older Americans Act two persons on the North Texas faculty had professional commitments to the field of aging. The chair of the Department of Economics and Sociology was Hiram Friedsam, the author of this memoir. His doctoral dissertation in sociology had been on a topic in aging. He taught a course on the sociology of aging, had published articles in gerontology journals, was active in gerontological associations in Texas and nationally, and had been a participant in a summer institute on aging conducted under the auspices of the Inter-University Council on Social Gerontology. One of the organizers and lecturers of the institute was Clark Tibbitts.

     The other faculty member was Herbert Shore, then the Executive Director of Golden Acres, the Dallas Home for Jewish Aged, who was teaching an introduction to social work course in the Department of Economics and Sociology as a part-time, adjunct instructor. Shore was widely recognized for his professional leadership in aging services, particularly in the area of long-term care. Through his participation in various meetings he knew Tibbitts well, and he and Friedsam were among the small group of persons who had organized the Texas Gerontological Society, which later became the Texas Society on Aging and finally the Southwest Society on Aging.

     When the implementation of the Older Americans Act began, Friedsam was doing research that utilized data from the nursing home licensure files of the Texas State Department of Health. Although no report was ever published because of inadequacies in the data, the research effort did result in a heightened interest in the characteristics and roles of nursing home administrators, an interest that was reflected in a research proposal submitted to the Administration on Aging. Several weeks later the response came from Clark Tibbitts. He indicated that a modified version of the proposal would be of interest to and supported by the training division if it were part of a planning grant that could lead to a program emphasizing AoA's retirement housing administration priority. Given Friedsam's research interest at the time and Shore's background and experience, it was inevitable that the emphasis of the planning grant and the curriculum to be developed would be on long-term care administration, an emphasis that was reinforced by a growing national movement towards the licensure of nursing home administrators.

     When the planning grant was funded, Friedsam embarked on a study of a nationwide, reputational sample of 30 administrators drawn primarily from voluntary, nonprofit homes, most of which were members of the American Association of Homes for the Aging (AAHA). Most of these homes were multi-functional with living arrangements that ranged from independent apartments to, in all cases, nursing care. Friedsam used a questionnaire that sought information concerning the administrator's education, experience, and role but also sought concerning the desirability and content of a curriculum in long-term care administration. In preparing the questionnaire the need for an internship (practicum, field placement, etc.) as part of the curriculum had been assumed, but the administrator's opinions were sought as to its structure, length, and--most critically--whether he or she would accept an intern from the program, if established, and provide appropriate supervision. Although some respondents pointed to the need for approval of the idea by their boards, the responses were positive and almost all of the program's early internship placements were in this group of homes.

     Using data from the survey, work was begun on a training grant proposal to AoA. A measure of Clark Tibbitts' interest in it is reflected in the fact that he flew to Dallas and met with Friedsam and Shore to discuss questions of structure and content of the projected degree program. In addition, he was strongly supportive of the inclusion of a second "track" in the program that would be oriented to the administration of aging programs other than those in retirement housing. He also visited with President J. C. Matthews to assure him of AoA's interest in receiving a proposal from North Texas, a visit that may have been critical to Matthews' subsequent support.

     In one sense Matthews was responsible for the designation Center for Studies in Aging. Friedsam was certain that a commitment by North Texas to an "aging identity" for the implementation and administration of the program would strengthen the proposal to AoA even though it would have to be housed initially in the Department of Economics and Sociology. At that time no true precedents for designating such a unit existed at North Texas, but "Institute" and "Center" were being used in a few universities to provide an identity and focus for gerontological activities. During the preparation of the proposal, Friedsam discussed these alternatives with Matthews who expressed a preference for Center in the North Texas context. Ergo, the Center for Studies in Aging!

     A measure of Matthews' support was his willingness to meet Friedsam in the President's office during the 1966-67 Christmas holiday period when the university was officially closed to sign off on the final draft of the proposal to AoA (Grant submission was somewhat more informal then than it has since become!), but his next step was even more important. Because the proposal was built around the offering of a master's degree, some action by the Coordinating Board for Texas colleges and universities was essential. Matthews therefore wrote (and may have talked) to Bevington Reed, then the Commissioner of Higher Education, to describe the program and the degree. Reed replied that, because the program was housed in sociology, the degree should be regarded simply as a special sociology degree, but the writer does not recall whether that was his decision or his affirmation of a suggestion in Matthews' letter to him. In any event, the Center's degrees were counted as sociology degrees until the establishment of the School of Community Service.

     Before that move occurred, however, the Center's program had become successful, in no little part due to support provided by the Administration on Aging. Although North Texas provided "matching funds," primarily as a portion of faculty salary costs, the first and several subsequent career training grants from AoA provided large amounts funds for administration, to "buy" some faculty time, to change Shore's status to Director of Field Instruction and his teaching assignment to a seminar on the administration of programs in aging, and to recruit Dr. Cora Martin, who was later to become Co-Director and then Director of the Center. While working on her master's degree in sociology at North Texas, she had been employed as a research assistant on a nursing home admission study directed by Friedsam, and she had also been a nurse and the administrator of a small hospital. That background, together with her Ph.D. in sociology and her teaching experience, was a major asset for the program. Later, as Co-Director and then Director of the Center, she would take the leading role in developing several special programs, including the summer and winter institutes and the publications program, among others.

     The early AoA grants also provided handsome support for students, including tuition and fees, stipends, dependent allowances, and support of travel to internship sites. The availability of such support coupled with the cooperation of the administrators of numerous long-term care facilities and other aging programs enabled the Center to recruit students, to place them in internships, and to help them find employment on a nationwide basis. For many years more than two-thirds of the Center's students came from out-of-state, a proportion that to the present has decreased only slightly among full-time graduate students. In addition, representatives from numerous colleges and universities throughout the country that had or were trying to develop gerontology programs contacted and/or visited the Center for information about its organization and curricula. In the area of long-term care administration in particular, the Center became the "model program" that Clark Tibbitts had discussed in the meeting with Friedsam and Shore.

     In addition to the career training grants (i.e., for the program leading to a master's degree), AoA provided support for several continuing education programs ("short-term training," in the agency's lexicon), most notably a week-long institute for faculty members from several historically black colleges that had received AoA grants and a bi-regional, week-long workshop for site directors of the newly emergent nutrition programs for the elderly. The Center also worked with the program committee of the American Association of Homes for the Aging to plan and implement the educational component of that organization's annual meeting, an activity that was independent of AoA support.

     Additional grants and contracts were received from several other agencies, of which the most important was the Texas Governor's Committee on Aging (GCOA), now the Texas Department on Aging. Work performed for GCOA ranged from assisting area agencies on aging (AAAS) to conduct a survey of needs of the elderly to the preparation of a handbook for newly appointed GCOA and AAA board members. Probably the most lasting product of the GCOA-CSA relationship was the creation at North Texas of the Gerontological Film Collection. As the result of a tripartite agreement among GCOA, CSA, and the NT Media Library, GCOA gave the library a few films that. it had acquired and for several years thereafter provided funds to CSA for audiovisual acquisitions. Maintained through a close working relationship between CSA and the Media Library, the collection now includes more than 400 items and is one of if not the largest collection of films about aging in existence. It serves CSA and many other units on campus, and through its rental policies it is a resource for other colleges and universities, governmental agencies, long-term care and other aging programs, and community organizations throughout the United States,

     At a very basic academic level the creation and development of the Center for Studies in Aging were not unique at North Texas. The late sixties provided numerous opportunities for federal funding of educational programs, and several faculty members, often urged on by the Dean of the Graduate School, Robert Toulouse, responded to them successfully. Among the programs that emerged with federal support were a summer institute for public school teachers of economics that evolved into the Center for Economic Education, a continuing education program in rehabilitation that ultimately led to degrees offered in the Center for Rehabilitation Studies, an industrial relations program conducted by the newly created Institute of Applied Economics, and a number of continuing education programs supported under Title I of the Higher Education Act that brought into being the University Center-for Community Services.

     By the early 1970s, it was apparent that these units shared several characteristics. One was the obvious bond of strong external support, initially federal but later enhanced from state and private sources. A second was their continuing education programs, often conducted off campus. Continuing education in any format was almost unknown at North Texas at the time except for a few extension courses, offered for the most part by the College of Education, and a small number of correspondence courses, taken chiefly to meet the legislated history and political science degree requirements. Third, all had a strong "applied" orientation, and finally, with the exception of the University Center for Community Services, all were offering courses for semester-hour credit through their host departments in the College of Arts and Sciences. These characteristics, however, resulted in uneasy relationships between the units and the host departments. To a considerable extent their academic objectives were different; the types of students enrolled and the course content offered were different; and, although external funds provided some latitude, the programs were theoretically subject to departmental control and, at the extreme, rejection.

     These considerations resulted in consultations among the unit directors that ultimately led to the preparation of a proposal to create a School of Community Service. The proposal was submitted to Gustave Ferre, who had become Vice-President for Academic Affairs under the presidency of C. C. Nolen, and received both local and Coordinating Board approval as a reorganization. In large part because each unit had developed state, regional, and/or national recognition in its designation as a Center or Institute, those titles were retained, but in many respects the units also behaved as "departments," initially with respect to curriculum and later with respect to the right to appoint and tenure faculty members. Senior persons who were already tenured in an Arts and Sciences department in effect held dual tenure, and some new appointments were made jointly between a SCS unit and 'an Arts and Sciences department. The final step, taken under Dean Toulouse's leadership, was the use of unit designations for course titles and the listing of their courses and degrees in the Coordinating Board inventory. The inclusion of the University Center for Community Services, along with the Office of Extension and Correspondence, among the original SCS units gave t he university a focal point for continuing education programs that it had previously lacked.

     Arguably the most important consequence of the establishment of the School of Community Service for the Center for Studies in Aging and the other original academic units and those that have since been added was to legitimize their claims on the university's state-appropriated funds. Faculty lines have long since been paid from "hard money," and even though operational budgets are usually inadequate, they are allocated from state funds. The pressure to generate external funds exists, but survival no longer depends on "soft money." Units can be judged by the same criteria that are applied to programs throughout the university.