Few people represent the spirit of a community the way Kathleen Culp does the village of Glen Ellyn`s. Her warm smile and easygoing personality are legendary in the central Du Page village.
Culp knows thousands of Glen Ellyn residents. That means she`s always bumping into friends and acquaintances at every local venue, sharing jokes and calling everybody ”hon.”
This friendliness is more than Culp`s labor of love. For the last 39 years it has also been her job.
In 1950, when Glen Ellyn`s population was a mere 8,000, Culp became the town`s Welcome Wagon hostess. A year later, she founded the Welcome Wagon Newcomers Club, a social organization for residents of three years or less.
”I wanted to do more for the new residents than just make welcome calls; so I founded the club,” she said. ”About 180 ladies attended that first meeting, and Newcomers has been going strong ever since.”
Today the Glen Ellyn Newcomers Club is 170 members strong, a success president Nancy Bromann credits to Culp`s continuing guidance and wisdom:
”Kathleen has wonderful insight and an incredible ability to assess situations. She intuitively knows what will and won`t work, and her love and dedication to this club have kept it going.”
Last fall, the Newcomers recognized Culp`s hard work by dedicating a park bench in her name and designating Nov. 18 as Kathleen Culp Day. The bench sits near the boathouse at Glen Ellyn`s landmark Lake Ellyn, which was the site of the first Newcomers meeting.
The bench is not the first distinction bestowed on Culp. Through the years, the village and the Welcome Wagon corporate office have recognized her contributions time and again. The village named her Woman of the Year for its sesquicentennial in 1984 and in 1986 declared the week of Feb. 24 Kathleen Culp Week.
Welcome Wagon flew her to New York City twice for recognition dinners and gave her a diamond pin for her 20th anniversary with the company. Employees in the Welcome Wagon regional office consider her a legend, said last year`s Newcomer Club president, Kari Scott: ”She`s really a symbol of what a Welcome Wagon hostess should be, and that deserves recognition.”
For the life of her, Culp can`t figure out what all the ”hubbub and hullaballoo” is all about. ”I figure I`ve just been doing my job,” she said.
Nevertheless, she`s hardly one to argue about all the flowery praise. As she said with a wink, ”It`s awfully nice to get a chance to hear your obituary before you die.”
Culp moved to Glen Ellyn in 1945 with her husband, Ray, and her young son Jere. Originally from Las Vergne, Tenn., Culp said she quickly acclimated to the Midwest and fell in love with the village.
When her husband died five years later, Culp chose to stay in her adopted hometown. To support herself and her son, she took a job that fit her warm, outgoing personality perfectly.
”Welcome Wagon was the suggestion of my minister and his wife,” Culp said. ”They said I`d been so friendly and helpful as a church greeter that Welcome Wagon would be lucky to get me.”
For four decades, Culp welcomed every new resident in town with a basket of flowers and gifts from local business sponsors. ”I`ve visited homeowners in all kinds of weather, in all possible situations, on their front porches, back yards, attics and even sandboxes,” she said.
During Glen Ellyn`s heaviest growth periods, Culp averaged between 80 and 100 welcome calls a month. ”I got so busy sometimes I couldn`t make the baskets fast enough,” she said.
Her fast-paced schedule prompted Culp to hire an assistant three years ago. The moved turned out to be a blessing last March when doctors put an indefinite hold on Culp`s Welcome Wagon calls.
”I was making a call when I fell and shattered my arm and shoulder in three places,” Culp said. ”Although I feel pretty good now, there is no way I could carry those 10-pound baskets.”
Her fall, though, hasn`t halted her attendance at Newcomers Club meetings and events. She has missed only three of the monthly Newcomers Club meetings in her 39 years, twice to attend her recognition dinners and once because of surgery. ”So I`m not going to let a broken arm keep me away,” she said.
”She also attends all our monthly coffees for new members,” said former president Scott, who with the help of member Barb Mashburn, was the instigator of Culp`s park bench honor. ”It wouldn`t be a Newcomers get-together without Kathleen Culp. It`s important to everyone in the club that she`s around.”
Culp, however, is the first to admit that some of the club`s events are no longer her cup of tea. She dropped out of the Newcomers bridge club because the crowd was becoming a tad too young for her taste: ”To tell you the truth, hon, I just wasn`t interested in hearing about baby formula and diapers anymore.”
This candor and frank humor have endeared Culp to thousands of new Glen Ellyn residents through the years. She has welcomed more than 30,000 of them to Glen Ellyn since 1950, and most of them call her by name.
She jokes that she walks around with a silly little grin on her face,
”you know, the kind you have when you`re positive you know someone but their name just doesn`t come to you.”
But even if she can`t recall a name, she will remember something about every person she has called on.
”She amazes me with what she remembers,” said Scott. ”When someone comes up to her, she not only remembers where they live but who lived there before, and many times what happened when she called on them.”
Culp has several humorous stories to share about her welcome calls, but a few stick out in her mind. On one occasion, she and a new homeowner were chatting in the living room when they noticed the woman`s child kept running from the kitchen to the basement with a paper cup in his hand.
”Finally, we asked the little guy what he was doing and found out that he had started a fire in the basement and was trying to douse it one cupful of water at a time.”
Another time, she and her host got so wrapped up in a converstion that they failed to notice how quiet the host`s daughter had become. ”When we went to check on her, we found her in the bathroom where she had unrolled an entire roll of toilet paper and stuck it in the toilet.”
Culp misses these visits but said she feels blessed to have been able to keep it up for so long. Now in her 80s, she looks back at her years with Welcome Wagon as both fun and rewarding.
”I`ve met so many wonderful people and had such a good time,” she said. ”And you know, in 39 years I haven`t had more than a dozen people who wouldn`t open their doors to my welcome.”
