Bea Lundgren, 88, and Louise Bishop, 91, were featured Wednesday in a Kenosha News story detailing their service to elderly clients and saying both have decided its time to retire as Meals On Wheels volunteers.
In 2001, Bea’s community service earned her Person of the Year honors. Louise wouldn’t be a bad choice for 2007 honors.
They were among the first people to befriend my wife and me when we moved here with our two toddlers in 1989 and became members of Bradford Community Church Unitarian-Universalist. They not only opened their homes to us, they opened their hearts.
That may sound overly sentimental, perhaps even a bit trite. But only if you’ve never met Bea and Louise or experienced their incredible generosity of spirit, vitality, intelligence and true beauty, the beauty celebrated in classic literature, the kind that’s more than skin deep.
Bea, Louise and Louise’s husband, Homer, our neighbors across the street and next door on both sides, as well as down the block a few doors and across the alley, were among the people I had in mind whenever friends elsewhere asked how we liked living in Kenosha. “Well,” I’d reply, “the place kind of grows on you.”
But it’s not so much place that grows on us, it’s people that do.
Shortly after we bought our home on Kenosha’s north side and began attending BradfordChurch, my wife told me Bea had approached her. She wanted to know if it was OK for her to “adopt” our son and daughter as their “Kenosha grandma,” my wife said. We gladly accepted.
The elderly couple who’d lived in the neighborhood three decades before we arrived likewise never scorned us as Illinois people, but welcomed us from the start. We miss them, the husband having died several years ago, his wife living out her waning days in a nursing facility.
Another elderly neighbor, now deceased, lent me his snowblower, told me stories about Kenosha, gave me woodworking tips learned from his numerous projects. When I saw the paramedics pull away from his house one morning, I knocked on the door. His wife told me he’d died in his sleep. “I lost the best man in the world. He was so good to me,” she’d sobbed. I embraced her while she wept.
Once, the neighbor across the street, a strapping pipefitter, noticed my our daughter was choking and sprinted barefoot across the street to dislodge the offending object before I could get outside to help. He later taught me how to sweat-fit copper pipes, replaced our hot water heater and did other work beyond my skills, always refusing payment on grounds that we’re neighbors.
When I came home after two months in the hospital, he carried a recliner into the house for me. His wife and kids, who grew up with our son and daughter, were there to welcome me home, too.
The couple’s kids next door also grew up with ours. When their eldest enlisted and went to Iraq, we kept him in our thoughts.
Every Christmas his mom brings over homemade candy. Dad’s always willing to lend a helping hand. Younger brother and sister care for the dog when we’re gone.
My wife and I were born and raised in Chicago, spent most of our lives there before moving to Kenosha to raise our family.
Sure I’ll always be a Bears, Bulls and White Sox fan, just as Dad stayed loyal to the Browns, Indians and Ohio State Buckeyes until he died, though he’d left Cleveland for Chicago, Mom’s hometown, when they married after World War II.
Aside from such relatively superficial loyalties, I’ll always harbor great affection for Chicago. In fact, it was Kenosha’s similarity to the WindyCity on a far smaller scale that attracted me initially. What’s made it home are the folks who welcomed us as friends — people like Bea and Louise.
