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These Civic-Minded Ladies Don’t Count the Hours or Years
Jean Grindle, standing, and Betty Billings are
co-presidents of Bucksport Community Concerns. Both now in their
70s and energetic as ever, they started the agency about 40
years ago. |
Jean Grindle and
Betty Billings can’t recall how many years Bucksport Community
Concerns has been a part of their lives.
They are too busy
caring for other people’s lives to count.
But it has been
since the early 1960s that these Bucksport women have run the
all-volunteer, non-profit organization. Bucksport Community Concerns
operates an emergency food pantry once a week, plus the usual-hours
Talk N’ Shop store on
Main Street for used clothing.
Bucksport Community
Concerns also provides referrals for neighbors in need of any
variety of social services. Additionally, the organization
supervises both Senior Companions and Meals on Wheels, which are
common to many Maine communities.
Even if what
someone needs doesn’t fit within any of those efforts, either woman
is happy to take the phone call, emergency or not.
“We deal mostly
with a lot of phone calls,” Grindle said. “If they took the phone
away, we’re in real trouble.”
“We have
volunteers, and these volunteers are the ones who do most of the
work,” Billings said. “We just run around and follow-up.”
Once just mothers
whose children knew each other at school, later both helpers within
the church’s Ladies Aid, Grindle and Billings today are a pair of
wise-cracking women. They think alike, as in: Nothing is impossible.
They manage to
provide for many of Bucksport’s neediest individuals, working off
both cash and in-kind donations. Last year’s dollar intake totaled
$39,000, some of it coming from the town budgets in Bucksport,
Orland and Verona. Whatever else comes through the door, such as
food or retail goods, gets passed on directly to those in need.
Without fail,
Grindle and
Billings
are found at the pantry from 10 to 11:30 a.m. every Thursday. They
give out food parcels in a downstairs room at the Congregational
Church, at the corner of Franklin and Elm streets.
But they never stop
to consider just how much they give of themselves. They have spent
nearly 40 years caring for Bucksport’s residents in need—but have
hardly stopped to notice.
Billings
is 79. Grindle is 75.
“Betty is smarter,
because she’s got a few years on me,” Grindle said. “She’s the
brains. I’m the mouth.”
“That’s what she
always says,”
Billings
said. “What are hours, anyway? I never think anything of what we
do.”
Said Grindle:
“People just call us with their problems. Sometimes it’s an elderly
person who lives alone. So we know that that’s someone for our
Senior Companions program. We know we can work that out.”
They hold titles of
Community Concerns co-presidents, but are quick to give credit to
the 12 volunteers in the pantry and 14 in the shop, all of whom help
to make Community Concerns work.
The list of helpers
doesn’t stop there. There are few in Bucksport who don’t help out
Community Concerns in other, more quiet ways. Teachers in
Bucksport’s schools, for example, have the option of designating a
payroll deduction as a cash contribution.
The resale shop and
pantry’s history actually goes back to the arrival in Bucksport in
1957 of the Rev. Ray Pike and his wife, Shirley. He was minister at
the East Bucksport and Orland Methodist churches, and suggested that
such a service would help the community.
Today, Bucksport
Community Concerns helps as many as 30 families a week through the
pantry. It tries to give out food that will last over five days,
across 15 meals.
When things are
tight, and when the demand is greater, the organization sometimes
has to cut back to handing out three-days worth of food.
November through
January are the months when it works with the most people in need.
April, too, is sometimes a busy month.
“Someone may live
in subsidized housing and pay $50 a month in rent,” Grindle said.
“But these apartments have electric heat, and sometimes they are hit
all at once with a $500 bill.”
Said Billings:
“There’s always an emergency here, an emergency there.”
Both women also
hold positions on a number of town committees dealing with health
and development. Because of those involvements, they tend to know
many individuals in town—either ones they can call on for help, or
ones in need.
“If you don’t go to
the meetings, you don’t know what’s going on,” Billings said. “That
way, everyone knows who we are, too.”
“It’s because we
are on these committees that we know who we need to be looking out
for,” Grindle said. “Heck, we have known these people for years.”
But Grindle and
Billings still decline to zero in on why they are so involved, 40
years on.
“Doing this keeps
us from taking too many naps, although naps are a good idea, once in
a while,” Grindle said.
Billings
again: “We are too busy to have any aches and pains. Too little time
to think about that.”
For more
information on Bucksport Community Concerns, contact Jean Grindle at
469-2706 or Betty Billings at 469-3432.
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