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- Parte de Records of the American National Red Cross, Historical Nurse Files
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the door, where she can get the most light. At
times, although it is difficult, she will climb
up the nine concrete steps to the yard.
Soon, at Mrs. Bullwinkel's réquest, Mrs.
Gray began talking about her children (she
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raised 10, including five of her own), the Red
Cross work she used to do, her membership
in the Eastern Star (the women's division of
the Masons), her nieces, her nephews
"You know, whenever anybody had any
lay
trouble, they'd come to me," Mrs. Gray
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smiled through her memories. Then the pres-
ent returned: "I'm not getting paid back for
it. I don't know why God punished me this
O
way."
'You shouldn't feel that way," Mrs. Bull-
winkel said earnestly. "You've been a good
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person all your life. It's like anything else. We
all wear out." She asked about the grand-
daughter's dog, Caesar, and immediately
Mrs. Gray was smiling again. "Oh, he's
a
lovely dog. He's crazy about me, you know."
The training program for the volunteers,
which consists of three two-hour sessions of
instruction, covers the emotional, mental and
physical changes that come with age (two-
thirds of those visited are old) and some
basic "dos and don'ts." "We try to get the
visitors to take the people's minds off their
Toneliness," says Joseph Roberts, a retired
businessman who is chairman of CCVV. "We
get them to talk about their own experience,
their own families. A lot of loneliness is self-
pity; that's human. But we try to get them
thinking in other channels."
They need volunteers. "We're just scratch-
ing the surface," Roberts says. (Anyone inter-
ested should write CCVV, P.O. Box 81, Floral
Park, or call the Older Americans Volunteer
Committee, 489-5000, Extension 386.)
Mrs. Bullwinkel, vice chairman of CCVV,
visits four or five people a week. When CCVV
gets a call from a church, a homebound per-
son's neighbor or a Public Health nurse alert-
ing them, she says, "I make the first visit and
sum up the person, because you want to send
a visitor who is more or less congenial." She
ends up going back herself. "Once you go,
they want you to come back. It's a funny
thing. They get attached to you very
quickly." /II
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