Charity Spotlight
Stories from a Walnut Creek Seniors Club Van Driver – Part 1 By Frank Napoli, Resident since 1996
I
’m lucky to be one of several volunteer drivers for the Walnut Creek Seniors Club. I have the privilege of taking out a WC minivan for several hours on Thursdays to drive seniors to do grocery shopping, or doctor visits, or down to the Community Center for some socializing over myriad of activities. Over the years I have enjoyed the stories that the seniors share with me. I’ll be sharing some of my favorites over the next two months.
The stories are amazing!
A number of our seniors have lived through some monumental events in the U.S. that many of us can only read about in history books. Did you know that the Golden Gate Bridge was constructed using steel that came from Bethlehem, PA? I had no idea. Yep, as one of the many public works projects during the Great Depression, one senior recalls her dad working at the steel mills and how the steel made its way to the West Coast by sea on barges that carried it out of Philadelphia and through the Panama Canal before reaching California. Construction began in 1933 and was completed in 1937. I also learned that the George Washington Bridge (connecting NY with NJ) also sourced its steel from the plants in and around Bethlehem. You might say that Pennsylvania provided desperately needed jobs from coast to coast during the Depression era. If you ever wondered where the NFL team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, got its name - now you know.
A very interesting sidebar to this story was the toughness of the Navajo Indians themselves. While in the L.A. hospital providing treatment, our WC senior tells me that the Navajo patients never complained about their injuries, often consisting of shrapnel which can be extremely painful. Their fellow American soldiers who witnessed them getting hit in battle, never heard them scream and always waited for someone else to call the medic. They absorbed the pain in brave silence. They were instrumental in helping the U.S. win WWll, including the Battle of Iwo Jima. Talk about unsung heroes! This story was later turned into a movie in 2002 starting Nicholas Cage called “Windtalkers.”
How to sign up to volunteer:
Part of staying socially active includes volunteering at special events. There are positions such as a receptionist at the Community Center or transportation program driver and others. If interested, just call 925-943-5852 to learn about current openings and to receive an application form. You can also reach out with ideas, feedback, and questions via email to recreation@walnut-creek.org.
Another Depression era story, as told by a senior in her 90’s from West Virginia involves her childhood neighbor, Don Knots, who later broke into television and is best remembered as Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife on the 1960’s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. The two were very close friends growing up and food was scarce. Don would visit her family on a regular basis where they would share what they had with him. And, then there is the senior who recounts some fascinating stories of living through WWll as a nurse in an L.A. hospital where she treated patients fighting in the Pacific theatre. One such story involves treating Navajo Indians who were attached to the US Marine Corps. These were the so-called “code talkers.” The code talkers were not combat soldiers in the conventional sense. Instead, they were recruited by the military for their Navajo language. Each code talker was deployed to the Pacific with a unit of Marines. There, they transmitted messages and orders about tactics, troop movements and other secret information. The Japanese would intercept these messages but were never able to decode them. Navajo was an unwritten language, with an extremely complex syntax and no alphabet, making it unintelligible to anyone without training. The code was not only unbreakable, Navajo soldiers could encode a message in seconds where cryptographic equipment of that day required at least an hour to complete the same task.
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