Scott Swanson
George Hughes had no idea what was coming when he rolled up to a strange house on Tuesday, June 16, with his daughter, Valerie Goff, and granddaughter Samantha.
Inside, the living room was packed with a crowd of senior women, who sat Hughes down on the couch and told him they had something special for him.
Murya Scherer and Jennifer Behrens unpacked a box, which contained a brightly colored blue, white and red quilt.
“What did I do to deserve this?” asked Hughes, 92, as Scherer and Behrens spread it across his lap.
The queen-sized quilt is made of a wide variety of red, white and blue squares, many with flag-themed designs.
The quilt was the result of long hours of work by the Jolly Stitchers, who used to meet twice a week at the Senior Center before those gatherings were shut down by the coronavirus.
“This is our way of honoring you,” Jolly Stitchers member Shirley Schumacher told Hughes.
Scherer said the group came up with the idea of sewing a quilt for a local veteran “some time ago” and was working on this one, its first, last year in the weeks leading up to the COVID.
“We found out that George is one of our oldest veterans,” she said, adding that the goal was to make sure the recipient was a Senior Center member.
Goff, Hughes’ daughter, said he served two years in the Army in Germany during the Korean War.
Hughes taught English as a Second Language at the Kansas City branch of the University of Kansas for many years before retiring in 1990, when he moved back to Sweet Home, where he’d grown up.
“He always knew he wanted to move back,” she said. “He moved back to the house he helped his dad build. He bought it from his grandfather.”
Hughes, who speaks Spanish “fluently,” spent a lot of time in Central America after his retirement, well into his 80s, Goff said.
“He took language classes there, in Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua,” she said. “He’d go down for a few weeks, stay there and take classes.”
Hughes has suffered three strokes in the last 10 years, so he’s had to stay closer to home, Goff said.
On one of her visits from her home in Kansas City, Mo. – she and her family have since purchased a home in Sweet Home where they spend part of the year, she said she kearned that the Senior Center offered exercises, taught by Delina Gilman.
“Literally on the last day of my visit, I went with him. He said, ‘I can do this.’ That’s really worked out well.”
Goff said Hughes was “so surprised” by the quilt that he didn’t say much during the presentation.
“He didn’t know how to respond,” she said. “But he loves it. It is just gorgeous.”
Scherer said the timing for the presentation was “good.”
“It lifted everybody’s spirits to start off the summer,” she said.
The coronavirus effectively shut down the Jolly Stitchers, “one happy family” of about a dozen participants who met Tuesdays and Thursdays “from 9:30 in the morning to 1:30 in the afternoon,” she said. “We stopped because we had to clear out for the Boys & Girls Club.”
The pandemic “affected us like everybody else – we were not able to do things we normally do,” Scherer said. “We had some small group meetings, but they were not associated with the Senior Center.”
Scherer, one of three participants in the group who are board members for the center, said things are changing.
“I would like to get us going, just like other groups, getting things started back up at the center,” she said.
Meanwhile, the group plans to make the veterans quilts an annual activity, Scherer said.
Those who worked on the first quilt, in addition to Behrens, Scherer and Schumacher, were Pam Barbee, Georgia Berg, Joyce Crebs, Bill Crebs, Marge Harer and Clara Windom.
“This is a hand-quilted quilt,” Scherer said. “We made it with hand stitches, we tied it. It’s all personal, hands-on. None of our quilts are machine-quilted. They are all hand-tied, hand-quilted.
“We really need to honor our veterans, not just on Veterans Day, but on other days of the year.”
Anyone interested in participating with Jolly Stitchers can contact the Senior Center at (541) 367-4775 and leave a message for her, Scherer said.