Meet Ida May Fuller, recipient of 1st Social Security check

LUDLOW, Vt.

Seventy-five years ago, the government cut 65-year-old Ida May Fuller a check. It was numbered 00-000-001 the first Social Security payout.

Fuller, of Ludlow, Vermont, didn't realize it at the time, but her check helped launch the granddaddy of all entitlement programs. And it secured Fuller, who never married and had no children, a place in American history.

Today, even as its future lies in financial uncertainty, many consider Social Security one of government's biggest successes. But in its infancy it was hardly a sure thing, and not well understood by many, including Fuller.

"It wasn't that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I'd been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it," she's quoted as saying in a Social Security Administration document.

Fuller, known around Ludlow as "Aunt Ida," died in 1975 at age 100. By then, she had already become a celebrity of sorts, with a few previous brushes with fame.

Fuller was born on a farm 2 miles outside Ludlow, then a mill town and now a ski town, in the heart of the Green Mountains. Future President Calvin Coolidge was three years ahead of her at the Black River Academy, now a museum.

Later, she worked as a secretary for the Vermont law firm of a Ludlow lawyer who had been Coolidge's attorney general.

In early November 1939, she passed by the government office in the larger city of Rutland and decided to pop in to ask about Social Security. While there she was urged to apply for benefits, not realizing she'd get the first check. That Jan. 31, 1940, check was for $22.54, a little less than the $25.75 that the agency had been deducting from her paycheck in the previous three years.

By the time she died in 1975 at age 100, she had received a total of $22,888.92 in benefits. Near the end of her life, when she was living with a niece, she told a reporter that the payments "come pretty near paying for my expenses."

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Meet Ida May Fuller, recipient of 1st Social Security check