They made history. Why not make more?

When you are 88 and 94 years old, as Betty and Frank Phillips are, and you've been plunging headlong into all manner of political conflict for 70 years, you're allowed to sit the next one out. The world will understand.

But on a mid-March afternoon, with the approach of the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the New York transplants are battling the establishment yet again.

Only this time, the epicenter of action isn't a college campus, or a smoke-filled war room filled with idealistic young adults. It's Pelican Cove, a retiree-saturated condo enclave in south Sarasota that doesn't much look like a bastion of Depression Era lefties.

The Phillipses are finishing last-minute rituals to stir their neighbors to action. For weeks, they have been distributing leaflets encouraging Pelican Cove residents to attend an anti-war street protest just down the road, off Tamiami Trail.

These days there are no riot police to contend with, or government surveillance agents keeping tabs from a conspicuous distance. Defying authority means avoiding the wrath of the condo association, which bans posting fliers on its property.

And the message, personally delivered by the Phillipses and a few others via scores of phone calls, has been tweaked for the Geritol set: If you're not strong or healthy enough to stand any more, take a folding chair.

Variations of this scene are being played out in small but growing numbers across the country.

Anti-war groups formed by and for seniors -- Grandmothers Against the War, Granny Peace Brigade, Grandparents for Peace International, Raging Grannies -- have been emboldened by the continuing conflict in Iraq. In California, retirement home residents called Mill Valley Seniors for Peace have been featured in a documentary aired on PBS stations.

"I think it may be because we've lived a long time and we see the futility and horror of war, particularly this war in Iraq," says Joan Wile, the New York City resident who founded Grandmothers Against the War after getting arrested with 17 others at a Times Square recruiting station in 2005.

"There's no draft anymore, so there's not as much incentive as there was during Vietnam for young people to care. But a lot of us aren't actively working at jobs, so we have more time to do this."

For the Phillipses, protesting the Iraq war is a periodic exercise that limbers up finely honed subversive muscles and keeps them from atrophying.

When they met in 1938, Betty was demonstrating in support of the Japanese silk boycott. As a student union leader at City College of New York, Frank had already marched against the administration's decision to invite Italian fascist students to visit the school. Frank's wrestling coach, Chick Chaiken, had been killed in Spain fighting for democracy as a member of the doomed American idealists called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam, women's rights, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, no nukes -- you name it, they have been there.

Now this. Iraq.

A few days before the anti-war rally in Sarasota, Betty is not optimistic about the turnout prospects. She suspects neighbors will choose to hit the links or play with their boats instead.

A den of radicals?

Pelican Cove counts at least a few opinionated residents whose past political inclinations would have fallen into the "suspicious activity" files once upon a time. Figuring out why they all flocked to one place leaves general manager, Kevin Richards, stumped.

What he will say is that the drowsy, lushly shaded, 731-unit complex hosts "a fairly mature community." He adds that they are "mostly retired, highly educated, professional people."

For instance, there's Louis Schwartz, a retired junior high school principal. He had a cousin who died in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade.

And what about Helene Susman? She is the widow of an American who was wounded in the Spanish Civil War.

Dorothy Ames was married to a New York playwright whose career was derailed during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

"We're not just a bunch of wild-eyed liberals down here with too much time on our hands," Schwartz cautions. "All of us have lived through a lot of history. And things are beginning to change again."

Whether or not history will vindicate them this time will depend on, well, historians. With the fickle winds of public opinion -- 65 percent, according to the most recent CNN/ABC News opinion poll -- blowing against President Bush's handling of the Iraq war, the Pelican Cove activists fall squarely in the mainstream. Today.

The turnout

Flags snap smartly amid the stiff breeze and gorgeous weather on the fifth anniversary of "shock and awe."

Demonstrators hoist signs at seven major intersections along Tamiami Trail. Their numbers are small but avid. Some motorists honk, a few flash obscene gestures. Most pass as if the gathered were invisible.

But at the southern boundary of the scheduled demonstrations, at Vamo Road, just around the corner from Pelican Cove, things are different.

Both sides of the highway are lined with demonstrators. There must be 150 of them. A few need walkers or wheelchairs. The numbers seem contagious -- horns are blaring nonstop approval. Small colorful signs planted along the soft shoulders ("Support The Troops, End The War") evoke Election Day props.

This is the first time on the line for Korean War veteran and ex-Marine Corps sergeant Irwin Lazar. "It feels good," says Lazar between returning motorists' waves. "We're living under a very nonresponsive government now. Maybe this is a reaction to that."

"Look at these people; look at their ages," says participant Arlene Ceglerski, a four-time grandmother. "This response is overwhelming."

An informal survey indicates many, if not most, are residents of Pelican Cove.

Protesters for life

It is early April, and Helene Susman is huddling in her condo with fellow demonstrators who showed up at the Trail -- Schwartz, King and Ames. Their seasonal departures are imminent, but all plan to continue their anti-war actions up North.

The most immediate milestone is on Sunday with the annual commemoration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade adventure at New York University.

From 1936 to 1939, without support or training from the U.S. government, nearly 3,000 Americans volunteered to fight against Francisco Franco, who was being aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Historians would later view the Spanish Civil War as the Nazi tuneup for World War II.

Roughly half those Americans were killed. Susman's husband, the late Bill Susman, was wounded in battle against General Franco's Spanish nationalists. He founded the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archives at NYU.

Susman went on to fight in World War II, but at war's end, Lincoln Brigade veterans were accused of being communist subversives. Their passports were revoked, and they had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to get them back. His widow, consequently, is fearless about disagreeing with Washington.

But standing up to authority did not come as naturally for Harriet Gayle. A seventy-something Connecticut resident, she is the only non-New Yorker in this bunch, and a little younger than the rest.

"I was brought up under the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he's a hero of mine," she says. "Back then, government was an institution that should be respected. Because it deserved to be."

But she lost that inhibition during Vietnam. As did Dorothy Ames. Ames was married to playwright Allen Boretz, best known for his 1937 Marx Brothers comedy "Room Service." His Communist Party connections resulted in him being blacklisted by Hollywood during the Joe McCarthy persecutions of the 1950s.

Ames, a writer who once managed and now owns the off-Broadway theater SoHo Playhouse in New York, was on the corner of Spring and Sixth avenues when the World Trade Center fell.

She watched the ashen, shell-shocked Lower Manhattan evacuees file past "like zombies" and took a couple of them in overnight until they could gather their wits.

"My house was covered in ashes," she says. "God knows what it had in it. I did a lot of coughing, I'll tell you that. It took almost a year for me to get the place clean."

For that reason, Ames feels personally insulted by the Iraq war, when the terrorists who befouled her city were largely Saudi Arabian.

The White House "thinks we're morons because they keep telling us the same lies and expecting us to believe them," she says. "But I do think you have to be absolutely stupid not to have a sense of despair about where we're going."

What's next?

From their northern home in Hyde Park, N.Y., Frank and Betty are already reconnecting with their buddies at the Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives. And maybe, with any luck, they will run into their Florida neighbors when they attend the Lincoln Brigade festivities at NYU.

By the time Frank and Betty reconvene with their Pelican Cove pals in Florida, a new president will have been elected.

Having actively participated in so much history, that might be a good time to slow down.

"You can't stop," counters Frank Phillips, whose parents kept a framed portrait of American socialist leader Eugene Debs in his childhood home. "There's too much work to do, too many people to educate, too many people to bring out of poverty.

"If I didn't think it was possible to bring about a better world, I'd be in total despair."