94-year-old finds time to volunteer
Published: March 21, 2005
Clara Phillips and Dietert Senior Center go together. For many, the two are synonymous.
Nearly 95, Clara remembers Harry Dietert — who retired four times in a battle against boredom — and his vision of creating a place where older people could find a new meaning to living. He bought a little stone house to see if seniors would or could develop it into a solution to the problems they all have in common. And they have.
But one of his early “solutions” was not so warmly received, Clara recalls. He planted a garden where the parking lot is today to grow food for the center and thought volunteers would care for it. That wasn’t in their plans, so he hired someone.
When Jim, Clara’s husband, died 27 years ago, she admits, “I felt desperate. I fell on my face.”
She just wanted to stay home where she had cared for Jim, who had Parkinson’s disease, during the last five years of his life.
The day after a counselor told her to mix with people, Clara showed up at the little stone house that had become Dietert Senior Center. She volunteered to “work any place they needed me, and I’m still doing it.”
“I look forward to it so much. I feel like I own it,” said Clara. “I’ve done about every job there is to do, from washing pots and pans for a month, to cooking, to filling in for employees, to working in Marie Hurt’s public relations office, to handling the dining room, to serving on the board of directors. I feel like I know Dietert Center inside and out.”
Clara said Dietert Senior Center has become an integral part of her life.
“I can’t count or list all the ways the senior center has made it possible for me to live a meaningful life, but the most wonderful thing of all is the good friends I have made. I feel good about myself. I don’t feel old even though I know it’s so when I have time to listen to my aches and pains,” she laughed.
Slowing down is not really in Clara’s vocabulary. The oldest of seven children, she was born in eastern Kentucky where “we lived off the land and were poor as church mice.” During the worst of times, four of her sisters were sent to the Masonic Home. After finishing the eighth grade in a one-room school, Clara went to tuition-free Berea College for high school and college. Berea’s work program allowed Clara “the best education I could have possibly gotten. We even had to learn a trade.”
As each of her sisters became of age, they came to live with her.
One of her memories is attending a meeting of the Berea trustees, going by train to Cincinnati and sitting next to the head of Proctor and Gamble during the meeting.
“He was glad to get a student’s viewpoint,” she said, “but I was so scared.”
While working at Berea after graduation, she met Jim, who was selling insurance, and she still has the $1,500 whole life policy he sold her. The policy brought her $3,500 from dividends never taken when a new firm bought it a few years ago.
When Jim retired, they drove to the Airstream factory in Los Angeles.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” she admitted, but a factory worker taught Jim how to drive while pulling a trailer. “They went around the parking lot once,” she laughs.
They traveled for 10 years, mostly staying in small towns and national parks. On their first venture into Texas, they stopped outside El Paso at a small town’s park for the night, and the mayor came out to welcome the visitors
“During our travels, we learned people are generally friendly,” she said.
They visited Kerrville four times — one in each of the seasons — before settling here in 1970 and building where she now lives in Lone Star Lodges. They began to play bridge at the budding senior center in a room just big enough for three tables.
“Clara can do it” became a byword at the center when she began volunteering nearly every day.
She said Berea taught students that all labor is dignified, you learn from everything and work is service in the community.
She served on the Volunteer Services Council at the Kerrville State Hospital when the center was part of the hospital and for a time after the two entities separated. Later, she was on the Dietert Senior Center board, carefully watching over expenses and calling others to task if she felt they were paying for something that volunteers could do. Her “historic insight” into the center was often enlightening.
Clara is proud of establishing the Harry Dietert Associates Trust along with three other seniors. The income will be for the center.
Asked what the center means to her, Clara answered, “Dietert Senior Center has been my salvation. It touches my heart and it’s hard to describe what it means. People need to feel somebody cares and they get that at the center. It’s the difference between my being lonely and in having a happy, busy life and lots of friends. Friends are the most precious thing you can possess.”
Wanting others to have the benefits of the center, she adds, “All seniors still have a life to live, they don’t need to put life on a shelf or be lonely or alone.”
She’s excited that the new center will offer even more programs and activities and in a spacious, beautiful setting. She’s happy for those who will use it and for those who volunteer. Not mentioning herself, Clara can’t say enough about what volunteers have meant to the center from the beginning. She gives volunteers the major credit for its success.
A typical Clara accomplishment came a few years ago when she and another volunteer heard what it was going to cost to paint the newly obtained Dietert home and decided to do it themselves. Despite worries from others about them using ladders, they worked nine hours a day for a week to get the job done — with some help from a professional who was instructed to take on the highest ceilings.
While the senior center has been a big part of Clara’s life, she has found time to get involved in the political scene and was an election judge for city and school elections for 17 years. She’s served on the board of the Unity Church of the Hill Country and volunteered at the Texas State Arts and Crafts Fair for years.
Up at 5:30 every morning “because I’ve always done it,” Clara is famous for not staying home. But since giving up driving a few months ago, she’s dependent on friends and the taxi for rides.
Here’s what Clara says of the future: “I have been looking ahead and planning what I’ll do when I become housebound with handicaps. I plan to invite various small groups to my home once a week to visit over a cup of coffee and talk, talk, talk with each other. I plan to ask Meals on Wheels drivers to give me telephone numbers of home-bound people. I want to get acquainted with them and have regular visits over the phone. I am saving good reading materials and a big envelope full of jokes and laughing matter. I’ll love and appreciate the volunteer from the center who brings me good hot meals at lunch. I’ll find many ways to still live a happy life.”
Clara credits the center with helping her live a happy life.
“Harry Dietert threw a pebble in the lake and no telling where the waves have gone,” she said. “ I don’t know what I would have done without the center.”
And many at the center don’t know what it would have done without Clara.
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