When 90-year old Dorothy Thompson lost her driver’s license, she felt like a teenager being grounded.
Thompson, a retired nurse, feared she would be corralled into a nursing home, bossing everyone around like a cranky old grandmother. But with aid from Meals on Wheels in the last two years, Thompson has been able to stay home.
For Thompson, the friendly faces of the volunteers who bring her food five days a week supply her independence as well as good meals.
On April 1, Meals on Wheels will celebrate 45 years with an open house. The organization brings meals to seniors, the homebound and the disabled for a fee, adjusted to their income.
“It’s not just a meal. It’s someone coming to their door, saying ‘how are you doing?'” said Mary Margaret Cox, the executive director for Meals on Wheels.
Mary Margaret begins her day at 5 a.m., each morning. In the darkness, she unlocks the door to the kitchen and supervises five cooks, who are already working in an organized frenzy to whip up over 150 meals for Weld residents. By 10 a.m., the meals, marked and made to match the residents’ likes and dislikes, are loaded into blue coolers, which hold the cold salads, desserts and juice or milk, and the red coolers, which hold meat, potatoes and vegetables.
The buzzing kitchen, with the black stove you might see in restaurants, industrial-sized freezers and clean, white counter tops was once gloomy and a haven to mice.
Cox started Meals on Wheels in 1970. She was a widow with three young boys. Going into a nonprofit business was a means to provide and serve others, a passion she said she found through her experience as a social worker. In those budding years, it was sometimes a struggle just to keep the lights on.
“We started with only $50 in the bank,” Cox said.
But then a check would come in the mail or a donor would drop by and Meals on Wheels would roll on. Times could be tough, but she found strength in the nonprofit’s mission.
Often, she said she thought of many of the older farmers, whose lives had been spent on their land.
“I thought why should they have to leave their home just for a meal?” Cox said.
Her organization had to move a couple of times, before settling in at 2131 9th St., a former Atmos Energy building.
Larry Moody, a volunteer and former board member for Meals on Wheels, has been with the nonprofit for enough years to know every route by heart. Like Cox, he has seen firsthand how Meals on Wheels provides more than just meals. They remember birthdays, and send cards, homemade cookies and flowers.
“They are usually surprised and ask, ‘How did you know it was my birthday?'” Moody said.
Moody also has helped to check on the welfare of each resident or let Cox know if someone is struggling with payments: In this case they can work something out so that residents keep getting meals. In 45 years, Meals on Wheels has never turned anyone away, said Cox.
For Cox, the nonprofit reaching 45 years is not just a success. For the volunteers and anyone who has been helped by Cox it is also a tribute to her.
“It’s a celebration of 45 years of Mary Margaret, too,” Moody said.
And as long as there are seniors in need, Cox said, Meals on Wheels will keep on with its mission.
“As long as there is one person that we haven’t found, then that need is there,” Cox said.