Today in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.
Americans pay into this program and then get benefits in retirement; it also supports some individuals with disabilities and families who lose parents.
Each person in the program gets a Social Security Number, which means somebody had to get the ball rolling.
So here’s the story of the person who got that very first number… well, at least officially.
It took more than a year just to get to the point where the government could add people to the Social Security rolls.
At first, the federal government started gathering information about workers through the US Postal Service.
Certain post offices could issue Social Security cards based on forms sent in by employees and employers; they would send the information to Social Security headquarters in Baltimore.
This process started in mid-November 1936, with at least a few cards going out ahead of the official start date of November 24th.
Technically those are the first Social Security numbers.
But on December 1 of that year, an official at the Baltimore HQ took a record from the first 1,000 individual accounts that were going into the master file and declared that was the first record.
Newspapers wrote that the first record was also the first Social Security Number, because that was the part of the system people recognized.
It belonged to 23 year old John Sweeney Jr. of New Rochelle, New York.
He was part of a wealthy family that actually voted against Roosevelt in the ’36 election, though Sweeney said he liked Social Security.
Sadly, he only lived to be 61, so he didn’t receive any of his benefits, though his widow did.
By the way, his Social Security Number was not the number one.
The lowest SSN on record is 001-01-0001, and that one went to Grace Owen of Concord, New Hampshire.
This was partly because she was the first applicant, and also because the first three numbers are assigned due to geography and she lived where people got the prefix 001.
Starting tomorrow in Indiana, it’s the Elwood Glass Festival.
People there have been making hand-blown glass art for well over a century,
Festivalgoers can tour local glass art studios, and enjoy live entertainment, rides and lots of food.
New Rochelle Man Was First Person to Get a Social Security Number (Talk of the Sound)