Care Cars back to the rescue

Pam Sloan’s voice rang on my phone like the bells of St. John’s Cathedral.

The director of Spokane Mental Health’s Elder Services program chimed with delight. Two days after my column ran on the demise of the agency’s Care Cars program, Spokane County commissioners found $10,000 to help rev up its volunteers’ engines once again.

“I’m going to keep this program and serve these people,” Sloan said with glee.

Care Cars, as I wrote two weeks ago, lines up volunteers who drive Spokane County’s frail elders, their walkers and their oxygen tanks, to medical appointments they can’t reach any other way. The program pays for mileage for the volunteers as well as a position and a half of staff time for recruitment, training and scheduling.

Now the program’s continuing through Dec. 31, and prospects for next year’s budget of $127,000, shared by Spokane Mental Health and Aging and Long-Term Care of Eastern Washington, look much better.

Volunteers gathered recently for a farewell potluck luncheon, where tears were shed and profuse thanks were offered for their hard work these last 21 years. Coordinator Diane Roberson wound down the program and began considering her own job search. Care Cars came to a resounding halt.

But a week later, Care Cars supervisor Mac Hatcher was sitting in a staff meeting when he heard the news. “My mouth fell open,” he said. “I was just stunned. I thought we were really on our way to putting this program to sleep forever.”

And soon phones began ringing throughout the county. Roberson and others scrambled to recruit the volunteers back into the program. Then they started sharing the good news with the 300 elderly clients.

Woody Hawkinson, the Methodist volunteer I wrote about who sings bass in his church choir, had already signed up to drive with a Catholic Charities program that serves only low-income elderly. He’d just come in from a trip last week when his wife told him Roberson called.

He dialed her back. “Are you sitting down, Woody?” she asked. The money was back. Would he return, too?

“I’ll come back,” he said eagerly. He’s got women he’s been driving through Care Cars for years, women who count on him for long trips from Medical Lake into Spokane for dialysis or shorter jaunts to downtown clinics.

One of his regulars is Ruth Herman, a widow who lives alone in one of Spokane’s old, tree-lined neighborhoods. Most of her friends and long-time neighbors have died. She survives with the help of a woman who cleans house and does her laundry, and a man who changes the water in her fish bowl and tends the lavender petunias that still bloom on her front porch.

Ever since the program ended, Herman had been laying awake nights worrying about how she’d get to her next appointment with Dr. John Floyd.

“I sure was close to tears, I know that,” Herman says. “It gives you an awful feeling when you don’t know what you’re going to do.”

Ten years ago Herman had a stroke, and now she has problems with her heart and her feet. She needs a walker to get around, and she can’t climb down the steps on her front porch on her own.

She and Hawkinson have worked out a routine. Picture 78-year-old Hawkinson, his hair balding, carrying 88-year-old Herman, hers nearly all white, on his back down her front stairs.

“I’m the only one that can handle her, really,” Hawkinson says. “I have to piggyback her down the stairs and piggyback her back up the stairs.”

He tucks her into his car, and drives her to Floyd’s office at Deaconess. There he heads up to the doctor’s office for a wheelchair as she waits in the car. Then he loads her into the chair and pushes her up to Floyd’s office.

When the appointment’s over, the whole operation works in reverse.

“People don’t know what we go through out there,” Hawkinson says.

County commissioner Phil Harris has been a Care Cars supporter for years. “I just love them to death,” he says. He scrambled to find the cash to keep the program running through the end of December, and he’s optimistic it will continue next year, too.

So this Thanksgiving, everyone who hopes to live to a ripe old age in Spokane County has reason to give thanks.

If you know of an elderly friend or neighbor too frail to take the bus to the doctor’s office, call Care Cars at 458-7450. It’s the only free program in Spokane that serves people of all income levels.

Herman’s voice peals with joy these days, too. She remembers the moment she received the phone call telling her Care Cars was back in business.

“Oh, boy,” she says. “I tell you I was really happy.”