Every Tuesday, Richard Lay gets into his car and drives to Good Shepherd Church in Park Forest.
A volunteer for the Meals on Wheels program run by Rich Township, Lay picks up food at the church and delivers it to clients in Park Forest, Richton Park and Matteson.
“For many of the people, it is their only hot meal of the day,” he says. “They can’t get out of their homes, they can’t cook, so at the end of the delivery I feel good.”
Lay says he feels privileged to help people who may not be able to get around because of their age or health. “I am fortunate that my health allows me to help them and the community,” he says.
The program, which was started in 1981, is designed to help senior citizens stay in their homes and out of nursing homes by delivering a hot-and-cold meal to them every day. Residents must be 60 or older or disabled to qualify for the program.
“It helps keep them as independent as possible,” says Sally Jurgensen, senior director at Rich Township. An estimated 30 people, most of whom are age 70 to 80, use the program, and there are 15 volunteer drivers.
“On an average day, I deliver meals to eight or 10 people,” says Lay, who has been volunteering with the program for 11 months. “The majority have special diets-low-sugar or low-salt. And everyone is always glad to see me. You can see sometimes that they are not well by the look on their faces, but they still greet you with a smile. That’s a reward in itself.”
Lay makes it a point to greet the clients and ask about their health, but he tries not to go into their homes because he doesn’t want to invade their privacy.
One exception was a client who was blind. Lay had been told to ring the doorbell, knock on the door and then go into the house. One day when he went in, he found the woman on the floor. “She had gotten out of bed to go to the couch and had fallen down,” Lay remembers. He helped her up and back to bed and then told the township office of the incident. “I opened up her meal, told her where the meat and the vegetables were, peeled the fruit,” he says.
The memory of the incident still lingers. He says it made him realize that people rely on his service. “I was actually able to help her, so I feel what I’m doing is worthwhile,” he says. He helped the client on two more occasions until her family finally made other arrangements to care for her.
“He cares about people and helps cheer them up,” Jurgensen says of Lay. “A lot of the people see only our volunteer, so it is very important they see a bright, smiling face. It is not just the meal but the contact that is important as well.”
Lay, 67, was born in Chicago and graduated in 1943 from Hirsch High School on the South Side. He was the youngest of seven children. By the time he graduated high school, four of his siblings were in the armed forces, and he decided to join the Navy. “I was overseas in the invasion of Okinawa,” he says. “We came back (to the U.S.) to repair our ship and a little while later the war ended.”
He came back to his family in Chicago in 1946 and a few months later married his high school sweetheart, Gloria. The couple have been married 48 years and have four children and seven grandchildren.
That year, Lay also joined a local utility company and worked there for 42 years, retiring in 1988. “I enjoyed it,” he says. His job, repairing high-voltage equipment, frequently required working on weekends and at night. “That was hard on the family,” he says.
The family moved to Matteson in 1949.
For the first few years of his retirement, Lay spent time with his children, all of whom live within driving distance. “I helped my kids fix up their homes,” he says. “There was always something that needed to be done.” The couple also traveled to Arizona, Florida and Nevada. “My wife and I like to square dance, so we went down to Texas a few times,” he says.
Lay was looking for something to do when his wife, who works part time at the township office, told him that the Meals on Wheels program was looking for volunteer drivers.
“I thought, `This is something I can do,’ ” Lay says. “It doesn’t involve a lot of time and you meet a lot of nice people. It could happen that sometime in the future I will need a service like this.”
