A good job for the retired.

A good job for the retired

Rob Wood was 41, fresh out of a job as president of an upper midwest printing company, when he heard about an opening. It didn't sound too promising.

The American Association of Retired Persons was looking for an associate director to take charge of its publishing division. He'd never worked for a magazine before and was a long way from retirement.

He'd been a newspaper reporter and an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times. He'd been a corporate executive for the publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and later helped turn around the company's failing $10 million printing subsidiary, but was fired after two years as part of a management reorganization.

The job, top position at the non-profit organization's house organ, Modern Maturity, was based in Southern California, his home for a decade, but otherwise didn't make too much sense.

"It seemed a little strange," he says. "When I first heard about it, I thought, `I don't know anything magazines or older people.' But then I thought, two years ago, I didn't know anything printing presses."

Wood took the job and in seven years has helped build Modern Maturity from a special interest publication distributed to 8 million retirees into a colorful, diverse, bi-monthly that has quietly become the largest circulation magazine in America.

Modern Maturity, published from the AARP's sprawling Lakewood headquarters, last year surpassed typical circulation heavyweights TV Guide and Reader's Digest and now boasts a paid circulation of 22,400,000.

Wood, meanwhile, has become a champion of rights for the elderly. He is still two years away from being old enough to be part of the organization himself, but as the magazine's publishing director he has become a recognized spokesman nationally on issues concerning people more than 50 years old.

"The idea that older people are couch potatoes with stretchmarks is not accurate," says Wood, now 48. "When you get to grandmother's house today, she may not be there. She may be out at computer class or on the late shift at the cannery. Working here has changed a lot of ideas that I formed when I was 7."

Wood, born in Libertyville, Ill. and raised in the wealthy far north Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff, grew up in a newspaper family.

His grandfather, Robert E. Wood, was a small town newspaper editor in Canton, Ill., a half hour southwest of Peoria. His father, J. Howard Wood, climbed the newsroom ladder from reporter to publisher of the Chicago Tribune. His uncle, too, was a reporter at the Tribune.

The younger Wood was always interested in newspapers, he says, but not enough to work on even his high school newspaper. In fact, his high school French teacher left perhaps the greatest impression on him, exposing him to 19th Century French novelists like Stendahl.

He attended Princeton, but uncertain about a career, earned a bachelor's degree in French literature and after graduation entered the Navy. He had enrolled in ROTC during college to escape possible draft requirements and was required to serve for two years. Still unsure about his future, he spent three years as a communications officer, the last year in Vietnam.

"I was trying to figure out what to do next," he says. "I wasn't ready to go to back to graduate school. So many things were uncertain."

Wood enrolled in the business administration master's program at Harvard University in 1966. He'd worked as business manager of Princeton's radio station and during summers worked for a radio station in Waukegan, Ill. While working on his master's degree, he held a summer job in the international ad sales department of Newsweek.

Still, he'd never written for a newspaper, even a college daily, when he took a job as a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times after receiving his MBA in 1968. His family connections, he admits, "didn't hurt."

He'd been a reporter for four years when he was named financial editor of the Times in 1972. Three years later he became an editorial writer and a member of the Times editorial board.

In 1978 he left the newsroom, curious about the business side of newspapers and somewhat insecure about his own journalism abilities, taking a job with Cowles Media Co., publishers of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune.

"I was concerned that I was a very good newsman when writing about something I felt strongly about, but dealing with the routine I didn't feel I was as good," he says. "I still had a lot to learn about the business. The offer from Minneapolis was too good an opportunity to find out how things were on the other side of the gap between church and state."

Wood worked for Cowles for four years and was president of a Cowles subsidiary, Edina, Minn.-based Information Publishers Inc., when he was let go as part of a staff reorganization and heard about the opening at Modern Maturity.

Modern Maturity first began publishing in 1958 when a retired Lincoln Heights high school principal, Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, founder of the National Retired Teachers Association, expanded her efforts to form AARP.

Members of AARP receive Modern Maturity as part of their $5 annual membership. Half the dues are earmarked for the magazine. Members also receive discounts on prescriptions, insurance and travel and other benefits. AARP is also a well-known advocate for the elderly in Washington.

Still, Modern Maturity is a self-sufficient and has an annual editorial budget of $70 million. The magazine's publicity kit is overflowing with studies designed to show advertisers that even though the subscription to the magazine is included with membership to AARP, the magazine is well read.

Members read 3.7 out of every four issues, the studies show, and spend an average of 74.6 minutes with each issue.

"We want to make sure everyone understands we're not a throwaway," Wood says. "We have some of the best numbers of any magazine."

The magazine, though, was largely an organizational mouthpiece when Wood took over. He immediately sought to expand the publication's scope and improve the magazine's writing, photography and graphics.

Today, it's almost impossible to tell by looking at the table of contents that Modern Maturity is aimed at older people.

Recent cover articles focus on the American Indian Dance Theater, the future of children in a changing world, wolves and the lasting power of the holiday movie classic "It's a Wonderful Life." The magazine has also featured stories about weightlifting, cruising Antartica, nouveau cuisine, credit unions and the destruction of the oceans.

Modern Maturity does feature more articles about the concerns of older people than, say, Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair, but most of the coverage concerns universal subjects like the "right to die" issue or is restricted to the magazine's monthly departmental sections. The magazine features monthly columns about preventative health care, personal finance and about government issues concerning the elderly.

The magazine was awarded a national "Maggie" award in 1984 as the most improved consumer magazine and earlier this year underwent a complete redesign.

Indeed, about the only thing that immediately sets Modern Maturity off from a score of other general interest magazines is its name and much of the advertising. Its pages do feature an unusually large number of ads for retirement resorts, electric scooters, large type book clubs, antacids and laxatives.

The type is also slightly larger.

"It's not a magazine about older people, it's a magazine for older people," Wood says. "People over 50 are interested in the world, not just themselves."

Wood wears a bow tie and is as bubbly as a small town mayor when talking about the magazine and the association's advocacy role. But he is as evasive about his own life as he is effusive about Modern Maturity. Fidgety and anxious, he turns defensive when questioned about his past, claiming not to remember facts that are normally easily recalled.

He is obviously more comfortable talking about Modern Maturity.

He recites the association's 28-word bylaws from memory like a Boy Scout reciting the Boy Scout oath. He proudly shows a slide presentation, spews out numbers about the importance of the elderly market and boasts of the magazine's stringent advertising standards.

Modern Maturity, he points out, rejected 38 percent of the advertising it received last year because the ads did not promote a positive view of aging. The magazine will not accept advertising for wheelchairs, chair and tub lifts, hemorrhoid remedies, prostate treatments, page magnifiers and many other products that present a negative view of aging.

"We don't take advertising that lumps older people into categories," he says. "We have a function to inform, we have a function to entertain, we have a major function to inspire. Our whole attitude is how can people overcome this problem. You can't lump 35 million people into categories."