Benefiting youth
Time was when grandmas spent their twilight years in their rocking chairs winding skeins of yarn, shooing away playful kitties.
Or was that just an old wives’ tale?
At any rate, it’s not true any more, at least in Spirit Lake, where 32 grandmas from their 60s into their 90s are involved in projects that better the lives of kids throughout North Idaho and as far away as Africa.
Grandmothers Club President Carmen Hammon says the organization’s most current beneficence is a $500 scholarship just awarded to Timberlake High School senior Amber Hunt on the basis of her grades, participation in school activities and an essay she submitted to the club.
Hunt’s is the third scholarship awarded by the club to Timberlake graduates, one in each of the past three years.
The club itself, she says, is “30 to 40 years old.”
Hammon explains that, last November, several club members objected to an activity that had them sewing “cuddle bags,” which they filled with quilts, clothing, school supplies and toiletries for distribution to North Idaho children of drug abusers and youngsters who have been victims of domestic violence.
The dissidents forced the club to cease the activity, but most members, Hammon says, decided to continue the project as a group, but not under auspices of the club.
They make the quilts and bags themselves, and they gather the money to purchase clothing, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and the like from periodic raffles plus the proceeds from a yearly style show and luncheon.
The ladies have put together at least 500 bags during the past three years, Hammon says.
Another activity pursued by the busy grandmas – they hold bag-making and quilting workshops every other week – is collecting supplies for poor youngsters attending Spirit Lake Elementary School.
Despite the fact that Joy French is a Coeur d’Alene resident, the Spirit Lake Grandmothers Club members have elected her Grandmother of the Year.
“She’s on just about all the club committees you can imagine,” says president Hammon, “and besides that, she does lots of other things for Spirit Lake.”
French, who has been a Grandmothers Club member for four years, says she developed an affinity for the community as a youngster. She lived on a farm between Blanchard and Spirit Lake until she was about 8.
Among her contributions has been arranging for members of the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Project Wild to pull weeds growing on Spirit Lake’s sidewalks and streets.
Project Wild is composed of juvenile offenders who are sentenced to varying terms of community service.
French was also in charge of landscaping the Spirit Lake Park and around the community’s senior center.
Furthermore, she conducts raffles to benefit club projects, collects donations from the American Legion’s women’s auxiliary and also collects stocking caps knitted by nursing home residents.
The Spirit Lake grandmas place most of the caps in the cuddle sacks for local distribution, but they give others to a merchant seaman who distributes them in Africa, where they protect children’s heads from swarms of flies.
Another active member of the Grandmothers Club is Bermae Linderman. According to Hammon, she’s a recent widow who volunteers for the Spirit Lake Senior Center. where she sets up the dining room for meals, oversees food deliveries to shut-ins and manages the center’s money.
“Oh, and don’t forget to mention Bonnie Elliott, Beulah Christianson, Sandra McCoy, Sharon Ostrom and Betty Alinson,” says Hammon. “They crochet the caps for the kids, and they sew cuddle bags, too.”