FOREVER YOUNG PROFILE Center on Sweet Bay Lane opened in February 1994. “Since then, it’s history,� Recchio said. “We started the roller hockey league over here, built the two hockey rinks. We expanded the baseball complex at Willows. We built the soccer complex over here with four fields. We built Ferrin Park behind Royal Palm Beach Elementary School, which houses three softball fields. Everything has grown from there.� For senior citizens, Royal Palm Beach runs a senior softball league, which plays three times a week at Camellia Park. It also sponsors the Young at Heart program housed at the Royal Palm Beach Cultural Center, whose 300 members participate in activities including a monthly luncheon with entertainment, special events and bus trips. Programs include seniors exercise, aerobics for seniors and regular AARP
meetings. They also coordinate with Palm Beach County in a senior lunch program. “There’s a group of between 20 and 30 seniors who come to the Cultural Center every afternoon and have lunch,� Recchio said. The village also offers painting and drawing classes, a writing class where anyone, seniors or not, can get into a club and write stories, as well as bridge and quilting clubs that meet every week. “There’s always something going on,� Recchio said. “We’ve pretty much converted the Cultural Center into a senior center during the day.� With the addition of the 160-acre Commons Park, now under construction and expected to be finished in time for the Fourth of July, Royal Palm Beach will have a park acreage-to-population ratio that dwarfs that of most other municipalities.
Recchio is extremely proud of having built a strong network of volunteers. “First of all, no program runs without volunteers,� he said. “We can set it up with staff, but if you don’t have volunteers to help run it, nothing is going to be successful.� Yet starting the Royal Palm Beach Youth Athletic Association remains his greatest accomplishment. “I look back at what it has grown into,� Recchio said. “It really brought the community together, because we’ve made lifelong friends through that organization. That is something that myself, my kids and others who were here back in 1986, we still talk about it when we see each other on the streets.� Recchio and his wife, Donna, had four children. Two, David and Michael, are deceased. Son Christopher is 33, while son Joey is 30. FY
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Page 8 â&#x20AC;˘ Forever Young Lifestyle Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ January 2012