I’m a jack-of-all-trades. I’ve worked in daycare and had my own day childcare business for years. I was assistant manager at the food stamp-issuing center when they used to issue just books of food stamps, and I’ve done some of everything. But I always had a compassionate heart to help. When I got involved with CCC, and they were doing all kinds of community stuff, it’s like wow, you know? And Quimby Park, that’s where we used to meet. Well, we still do have that meeting, but it was going down. Nobody used Quimby Park, but as kids, when we all grew up that was like a big, you know, sledding point but you know, it’s a great big hill that we had sleigh rides down with the sleds, you know, and it was just all just there, no one used it except us. And so we said, we start pushing for them to try to save it because the roof went bad on it and everything and we kept on, kept on, and they put the roof on.
Then they just stopped. Then we got a couple of people in to start helping us fight, and they started renovating, then they started seeing how many people were excited to, you know, see Quimby return. It was like, okay. So now they’re doing a lot to Quimby; they’re supposed to, you know, keep on improving it. But, they refuse to put restrooms on the outside. The park has swings and children’s playground equipment; they have picnic tables, we have a pond, they keep fish in there, so they go fishing. But there’s no restaurant in the shelter; the shelter house is not open. Well, 75% of the time, the shelter house is not open because it’s only open if, you know, someone rents it out for we have something.
We’re not there every day. And our fight now is to try to get them to see that it’s not like the other parts where you’re riding a bike through. But if families come to picnic, you know, there are no stores even close to go to the bathroom. So that’s one of our biggest fights right now is to try to get them to see that we need restrooms for people to enjoy the park.
It’s right in the neighborhood, right in the smack of the neighborhood. And it’s unusual. It’s almost 100 years old, you know, so it’s historic. They’re doing a beautiful job on getting it together, but it needs to be complete, so one of our fights with them is trying to get it back together.
We do Juneteenth every year. We’re the only ones in all of Warren that does Juneteenth. We do it every year. And it’s getting bigger and bigger because we want people to know the history. These young people don’t know anything about our history. And we want them to at least come and see and have some of the old things, how things might have been.
We also do cleanup. We cleaned up Main Street. We went on Main Street and cleaned the bridge this past Saturday with another group. We cleaned the bridge, all that stuff off the bridge and stuff. We do cleanup twice a year, at least. We have different fundraisers and stuff to keep things going. You know, we have, we serve food free sometimes, you know, to the community. And we try to improve more and more. We were doing better until COVID came on and, like, set things back, but we have a lot of ideas, and our biggest thing now is to get some young people. We are all senior citizens. There are probably like three of us that’s not. So we’re seeking new members. So while we still got this going, they can come in, and I know it’s going to be hard, but they need to take over kind of. Don’t forget about us, but, you know, get things moving, you know, while we still have this community group going. So that’s what we’re seeking right now: to get bathrooms back and get young people in, get involved. It’s so, I mean, just so remarkable the minds of these young people, bringing them into action and putting them together. We must work on that.