Despite the California sun in the summer of 1933, sixty-six-year-old Francis E. Townsend’s mood was gloomy. He had just lost his job working as a physician for the Long Beach Health Department. Although the work itself had been bleak — attending to the city’s sick and poor was soul-wracking — not having a job was worse. Townsend, like millions of older adults during the Great Depression, found himself without savings, without work, and, most of all, without hope.

Who would ever want to grow old, Townsend wondered, only to grow poor? Townsend was not alone in his despair; suicides among sixty-five- to seventy-four-year-olds reached levels higher than at any time before or since. One day, while staring out the window, he saw three old women digging through the trash for scraps of food. At this sight, Townsend nearly jumped out of his chair. As he later recalled, ​“A torrent of invective tore out of me, the big blast of all the bitterness that had been building in me for years. I swore, and I ranted, and I let my voice bellow with the wild hatred I had for things as they were.”

When Townsend’s wife — a South Dakotan named Wilhelmina Bogue — rushed to soothe him, Townsend batted her away: ​“I want God Almighty to hear me! I’m going to shout ​’til the whole country hears.”