By LOIS KINDLE
The annual Salt & Pepper Outstanding Senior Awards are presented by the Senior Connection Center of Tampa to recognize the achievements of some remarkable local senior volunteers. The awards highlight their efforts in helping other seniors and folks with disabilities live independent and dignified lives.
This year’s awards were announced online May 24 during Older Americans Month. Debbie Caneen, of Sun Towers, hosted a local watch party of the event at the senior retirement community. FirstLight Home Care’s Janice Bayruns and Connie Lesko, of the Retired Officers Club at Freedom Club, assisted Caneen with the event.
Among the six winners was Sun City Center’s own Bill Hodges, 81, a longtime advocate of positive communication and veterans advocate. Nominated by Lesko, he was recognized in the category of Arts and Entertainment.
“These awards are special to me, and for several years I’ve enjoyed nominating an outstanding and contributing resident of my community,” Lesko said. “This year that person was Bill Hodges.
“Bill has been deserving of this recognition for 20 years,” she continued. “He’s a public servant and patriot who uses his gifts as a writer and public speaker to inform and motivate others. He freely offers his time and talent as a veteran’s advocate and is constantly creating new ways to serve ‘America’s finest.’
“You gotta love the guy. Bill challenges all of us to be positive and patriotic,” Lesko said.
Bayruns, a Senior Connections Center board member representing Hillsborough County, agrees.
“Because I live in Apollo Beach and serve the greater Sun City Center area, where there are so many wonderful seniors who give so much back to their community, it warms my heart to see some of them recognized in this way,” she said. “Bill has a unique collection of experience and skills, which he uses in a variety of ways to be a beacon of positivity for so many.”
The 40-year-resident of Ohio, who served in the Air Force and formed Hodges Seminars International in 1980, has spent his entire career as a professional speaker and seminar leader. In the early ‘90s, he started writing “Positive Talk,” a weekly syndicated column, to offset some of the negative news seen frequently in his community’s paper. At one point, he was in 26 papers around the country.
After moving to Florida in 2000, he continued his messages of positivity by writing the column for The Observer News. In 2015, he started and still maintains the Veterans Photo Program for the Sun City Center Community Association. By 2018, he had launched his Veterans Corner Radio Program on Sun Radio WSCQ 96.3 FM to increase public awareness of veterans and their benefits.
Two years later, he turned the program into a wildly popular podcast now heard in all 50 U.S. states and 28 countries around the world.
Hodges is a champion of veterans. He himself served the Air Force Strategic Air Command from 1959 to 1963, achieving the rank of E4. According to the VA, he has a 100% service-connected disability.
In 2019, the Veterans Council of Hillsborough County awarded him its Keeping the American Spirit Alive Award; he and his wife Phyllis started Freedom Floats at their home on North Lake to treat veterans to complimentary rides around its waters on their pontoon; and he was selected to emcee the opening of the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital’ community-based outpatient clinic in Riverview.
In 2021, he emceed a veterans recognition program, sponsored by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio. That same year, the Sun City Center chapter of the Military Officers Association of America made him an honorary member, and this year he was named the Military Order of World Wars first “Patriot,” in a nationwide program, which enables him as an exceptional veterans advocate to participate in MOWW activities.
To this day, he continues to speak about veterans before community and military groups.
Hodges was delighted to receive a Salt & Pepper Award this year. “When you receive recognition from people who really know you, it’s a wonderful thing,” he said. “Only 7% of people have ever served in uniform and 63% of those are age 65 and older. We’re a very small group, so it’s important to keep the fires burning so Congress is aware of the great job the VA actually does. It has certainly served me well.”
His wife said he received help navigating the VA system from the Sun City Center Chapter of the Disabled American Veterans, and that’s the reason he’s so committed to helping others do the same.
Hodges can be reached at bill@billhodges.com/.