Lee Wade Pours Decades Of Service Into East Central Area

To Lee Wade, the little fountain in the lobby of the East Central Community Center isn’t just a mosaic of clay tiles with water spurting from it.

It’s a fountain of youth, made by neighborhood kids she remembers from nearly 20 years ago.

And it symbolizes the place Wade calls home, and the people she stays young at heart to help.

“She loves it,” says the center’s director, Diane Jennings. “You can see it in the look on her face.”

People at the center see that look a lot, because Wade is always there. Though she has never been a center employee, most folks think she works there.

It’s no wonder.

She’s a member of the East Central Community Organization, East Central Advisory Board, East Central Senior Center, East Central Steering Committee. …

Well, if it’s East Central, she’s on it.

She was involved with the center even before it opened in 1978. She helped establish the place.

“Her days are filled, and it’s always with service,” said Mary McIntyre, who puts out the center’s newsletter.

But if you ask Wade about her 20 years of volunteer work, you won’t hear much about about her.

“We don’t go out and and get other people to do things. We just do it,” says Wade, who retired from the staff of the Brotherhood of Friends club in the mid-1980s.

“People in this neighborhood, we have togetherness.”

“We’re forever writing grants.”

“We go here to get our souls taken care of.”

Don’t be fooled by her pronoun of choice, friends and neighbors say.

“Most of the time, when she’s talking about what other folks have done, she did most of it,” Jennings says with a laugh.

Before the center opened, the neighborhood had a small recreation center. A former grade school, Edison, served as home to a senior center.

St. Ann’s, an old Catholic school, was home to a day-care center.

But those were only temporary. Wade and other neighbors wanted a permanent home for such services.

They found that federal community development money was available to help.

Neighbors held meetings. They planned. And the children made the handprint-stamped and kid-scrawled tiles that make up that lobby fountain.

East Central was the first of Spokane’s community centers. These days, its campus is home to a library, a day care, a health-care center, a gym. It helps neighbors in financial straits.

Wade helped get it all started, and she has never stopped.

A few years ago, “there was a lady dying of cancer, no family,” Jennings says. “The lady told Lee she didn’t want to die in a retirement home.

“Lee packed her up and stayed with her a month until she died.”

When Jennings moved to Spokane 10 years ago, she didn’t know anyone. She and her husband were immediately befriended by Wade.

“We’re her adopted grandchildren,” Jennings says. “She’s so warm.”

Many of her other adopted grandchildren made the tiles for the fountain. But it hadn’t worked in at least a decade.

In August, the center had it fixed.

Wade loves to show off the newly spewing fountain. When she sees it, her expression changes from issue-burdened seriousness to a motherly smile.

She’ll point to each tile and talk about the children who now are all grown.

Wade recently placed a fern at the fountain’s base to spruce it up. Kids who attend center functions now are making their own tiles to add.

“It’s the heart of the center,” Wade says.

So is Lee Wade.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo