Catskill Neighbors

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Sofie Solber Franzen  0:03  
Well, Catskill Neighbors have been part of my life. They're just very good people. My soul absorbs the goodness. It's that simple. It's that simple, you know.

Brett Barry  0:18  
That's Sofie Solber Franzen, an 89-year-old client of Catskill Neighbors. Catskill Neighbors is a community-based volunteer organization, whose mission is to help seniors wishing to remain safe and comfortable in their own homes. I'm Brett Barry and this is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast."

Audio  0:40  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  0:39  
I met Sofie at her Pine Hill home where Catskill Neighbors volunteer, Gary Kusen, was accompanying her for part of the day.

Gary Kusen  0:45  
Today, we'll be spending time at home giving some of the respite folks that have been helping Sofie out since she got out of the hospital a break. I'm also helping her with her bills right now.

Sofie Solber Franzen  1:03  
I broke my hip some time ago and they just came and cared for me.

Gary Kusen  1:10  
This week, you have an eye doctor appointment. Someone will be taking you to that and then you have the ...

Sofie Solber Franzen  1:18  
We're live ... an appointment with the foot doctor.

Gary Kusen  1:20  
Right.

Sofie Solber Franzen  1:21  
One of my babysitter's ... she's gonna take me there, you know. Well, that's one of the tragedies. When one gets old, the nails become very hot and they're virtually impossible to clip, while you are a young whippersnapper. So you don't have that problem.

Brett Barry  1:41  
Sofie is a font of stories and good humor and I could have sat with her all day, especially after referring to me as a young whippersnapper. And later ... this observation.

Sofie Solber Franzen  1:52  
I can tell there's goodness in your eyes.

Brett Barry  1:56  
Oh, good. I was hoping that you were gonna say that.

Sofie Solber Franzen  1:59  
Because it's really true and I'm really mistaken. I inherited from my mom ... my mother. My mother was not an educated woman, but she could look at somebody, and after a few minutes, she could determine if that was a good person.

Brett Barry  2:16  
We'd started our conversation with another good person in Sofie's life: Reverend Ralph Darmstadt, who founded Catskill Neighbors in 2011. Ralph died this past January and he was a bright light for many a Catskiller.

Sofie Solber Franzen  2:31  
It's my pleasure to speak about Ralph Darmstadt. You know, he and I ... we were on the telephone every week and he was just an extraordinarily good man. It was all in his eyes, you know, like the eyes are the picture of your soul and it was all there.

Brett Barry  2:52  
Reverend Darmstadt's legacy lives on in Catskill Neighbors; where Gary Kusen is vice-president and Patricia Ruane is president.

Patricia Ruane  3:01  
It is pretty daunting for me to follow in the footsteps of our founder, Ralph Darmstadt, who recently passed. So I have big shoes to fill, but there's a lot of work to be done and a lot of help because we are a volunteer organization that gets a lot done. My name is Patricia Ruane. I have the privilege of being president of Catskill Neighbors, Inc., which is not for profit that serves elders in the kind of rural community where the three counties [Greene, Ulster, and Delaware] meet on the mountaintop. We train volunteers. Many of whom are also retirees and they partner with clients who are elders needing help with shopping, with socialization, with rides to doctor's appointments, and to all kinds of other services in a place in New York that is pretty much a resource desert. So we are servicing these people, and as their needs change, some of them stay at home as long as they can and then they are moved to nursing facilities or they move in with family, but we maintain relationships with a lot of people through to the point that they pass and then our volunteers continue to work with the families and stay in touch with those families. So it's a very beautiful relationship, and we have at this point, I'm going to say about 30 active volunteers and about that many clients give or take, and besides that, we are really working in partnership with places like Pine Hill Community Center with the Wellness Rx Pharmacy for the Public Good in Phoenicia with Jewish Family Services with the Ulster County Office for Aging and any other agency that has an interest in meeting the needs of seniors in this part of the world.

Gary Kusen  3:14  
We also are in touch with Delaware County Office of the Aging and, on occasion, Greene County, but our primary focus of late has been in Ulster County. My name is Gary Kusen. I'm currently the vice-president of Catskill Neighbors.

Brett Barry  5:21  
Ralph Darmstadt, who passed just recently founded this organization, can you tell me who he was and how this came about?

Gary Kusen  5:29  
Well, somewhere in 2011, right after Hurricane Irene, many of our seniors and other folks were stranded as a result of the hurricane. So Ralph started taking in donations of food and clothes. At that point, he was still involved heavily with the Methodist Church in Fleischmanns and people came, made donations, picked up things. He started taking folks for rides to their doctors. The first mission statement was bring together volunteer neighbors to provide the ordinary assistance for residents to remain safe and comfortable in their own homes; things started to get back to normal after the flood, and somewhere in 2016, the mission statement was refined to focus on seniors and it's kind of stayed there ever since. We've had still some occasional folks that we help developmentally disabled or otherwise.

Patricia Ruane  6:29  
Ralph was a person who walked his spiritual talk in every possible way. He saw a need he responded and always dealt with everyone interacted positively. I never saw him make a down statement. Everything was positive, hopeful, upbeat, and wonderful. I want to share with you one of the things that someone said at his funeral service. She said, "Ralph stood with me at every tough moment in my life," and he reminded me that the 23rd Psalm, which has a middle section that says, "When you walk in the valley of darkness, he reminded me that I could pass through." I didn't need to camp out there. I love that he was earthy that he was wise that he was simple and humble and I would also say that his background is very extraordinary. He grew up with a hearing problem and teachers back in those days didn't understand anything about special education. He was put in the back of the room with crayons and paper. He got to about 27 years old; couldn't really read or write and felt a call from God and had to really turn himself inside out to respond to that call and I think that he has surprised people in every single job that he's ever had in terms of how much he accomplishes, how many people he brings along, and how good the work is when people are doing it together in the right sort of spirit of love, so I just have nothing but gratitude for the encounter that I've had with this man. He has inspired all of us.

Brett Barry  8:25  
And Catskill Neighbors is just one of his legacies.

Patricia Ruane  8:29  
It's just one and, in fact, a part of what helped us launch and if you will get professional was he was awarded the AARP Senior of the Year award five or six years ago and that came with a $5,000 stipend, which he just turned over to Catskill Neighbors that became our source of funding, and since that time, I would say, "We professionalized ourselves. We really have rigorous training at this point. Our volunteers participate in hours of respite care training because some of what they're doing is they're going in to situations where there's a full-time caregiver who needs a break and these people are trained to be able to help in that situation and be positive and kind and useful and not judgmental. We're talking about very difficult issues like how do you deal with a situation where your client dies and you're participating up to the end, what is that like, what should you be aware of, how should you prepare yourself, things like that. So our volunteers very much appreciate the opportunity to meet online with people who are psychiatric nurses and psychologists and as they try to orient themselves for the eventualities that this may happen with them.

Brett Barry  8:29  
So you bring those professionals in for the training.

Patricia Ruane  8:54  
We do and some of those professionals are also volunteers with us, which is wonderful, so we have a very broad section of people, social workers, psychiatric nurses. My background is I'm an education administrator. So we have organizational experience, we have people experience, and we have professional development planning experience. So all of this comes together and as I often reflect ... before I retired, I didn't understand how much of the world counts on the work of retirees and that's really what we're doing.

Brett Barry  10:25  
And now, as a 501(c)(3) are able to take donations from many other sources, right, so is that helps the organization and also if he could tell me like where some of that money goes, where's the need financially?

Patricia Ruane  10:36  
Yes, we are able to take donations. Some of those monies help pay for insurance. So for instance, all of our drivers, all of our volunteers have coverage. If they're in a car with one of our clients and something happens, we are covering them. So if we have a luncheon or something like that, then we're covering that sort of thing. But most of the benefit of the 501(c)(3) is that it allows us to go after grant money and we have done that for our training purposes. We're in the middle of trying to do something right now that would create a safety net for people who are discharged from local hospitals. The experience that we hear over and over is it feels like you've been pushed off a cliff. People are still sick. They're being sent home. There's no one there to help them sort through their meds. There's no one there to help them with follow-up doctor's appointments or paperwork that may need to be filed for, let's say, a Medicaid application and so we're really looking to create a combination of resource people and agencies including the pharmacy, Jewish Family Services, Catskill Neighbors, and Office for the Aging to try to create a team that would include retired nurses, some of our volunteers, pharmacy people, mental health people, social workers to help come in as a SWAT team and do that kind of work, so grant money is really important and we can go after it.

Brett Barry  12:11  
Are there other organizations like this that you know of or is this something that you feel is special?

Patricia Ruane  12:16  
In our area, we're the only one. We know from the Office for Aging at Ulster County that we're one of a kind and they are very grateful that we're out here because if they get a referral of somebody needing something, they can't help from Kingston, but often we can. So they would, I think, like to see us replicated in other parts of Ulster County, but it requires, you know, a group of people who are willing to sit down, roll up their sleeves, and get it started.

Brett Barry  12:47  
Do you have a geographical boundary that you work with them?

Gary Kusen  12:50  
We try to focus along the Route 28 Corridor, basically from Andes through the edge of Shandaken.

Patricia Ruane  12:59  
Yeah and it ends up ...

... Olive and Shokan.

Gary Kusen  13:03  
Right, and a little bit up into Greene County and just a little bit why that is ... if I live in Fleischmanns, I have to go all the way to Delhi for social services. If I live just over the hill in Pine Hill, I have to go all the way to Kingston.

Patricia Ruane  13:18  
Right, and if you live down the road here another half-mile, it's Greene County and you have to go to Catskill, so ...

Gary Kusen  13:25  
And to get there, you have to either go over the mountain or around the mountain and it's very difficult for those folks.

Patricia Ruane  13:33  
We are servicing a community, not a county that is bounded, and then leaves off the rest of the community and that's ... that's a ... that's a tough thing for people to deal with because the monies tend to go in a sort of county niche.

Brett Barry  13:50  
Of the Catskill seniors who may need an organization like this ... how many do you think know that it exists and how do you get that word out?

Patricia Ruane  14:00  
It's a work in progress to get the word out. The Town Hall at Shandaken is very aware of who we are and what we offer. The Office for Aging in Ulster is very aware and a lot of their [New York Connects] professional staff call me regularly when they have some sort of an issue: we advertise through churches, we advertise through the food pantry, part of what we do is double service. So I deliver groceries for the food pantry. I pick up clients from the grocery people that I deliver because I see the need. And I say, "Here's a card from Catskill Neighbors. If you would like help, please contact me and follow up and most of the time people do that." So it's a little bit word of mouth. It's a little bit through formal networks. When we have something like the free rides program, there's a planning group in Shandaken called PH2. This free rides program is something that they're aware of and advertising as part of what they call small wins that are trying to make this town more accessible, more friendly, and more in our case possible for older people to be here and not feel so isolated.

Gary Kusen  15:20  
And we also get direct referrals from, for example, Social Services in Delaware County and, occasionally, we will get referrals from healthcare organizations.

Patricia Ruane  15:32  
Part of what I think we would like to do a better job with and this is where this grant might come in is to talk with the hospitals [their discharge offices], so that they know that there's a safety group out there waiting to receive somebody when they leave the hospital. So that group hasn't really been on our radar and we are not on theirs, but we're trying to make that change. I would also say that the pharmacy for the public good, which is another not for profit and, in fact, the only one in the country is also wonderful about promoting: they have our cards, they have the emergency folders, they're distributing those things. They're talking with people if they need rides to medical appointments and they're ... they're sending people our way. So all of those things, it's still a slow process. But, frankly, if we have 30 people, there's only so much we can do, you know, part of what we're trying to educate people around us, we're not just a taxi service. What we're trying to discourage is people thinking that we are a call and we'll take you anywhere you want to go because we really don't have the resources for that. Gary mans the phone, and then he'll bounce it to me if it's a Shandaken issue. If it's a Delaware County issue, he handles it, but I get things like I need somebody to come over and help me take out my air conditioner, okay, or I need somebody to take me to the store because my driveway is slippery. Can they do that this afternoon? We can't operate like that. We don't have the resources. We don't have the manpower, but we do have in addition to the 30 people that I told you about ... about 10 people who are specifically participating in the free rides program, so that they will give me dates than they're available for the whole month, and then if we have a call that says, "I need a ride," I look and see if there's a match for that day and there generally is and I set that ride up.

Brett Barry  17:35  
After the break, Gary recounts meeting Ralph Darmstadt for the first time and signing up with Catskill Neighbors. Patricia tells a story or two from the field, and of course we'll give 89-year-old Sofie Solber Franzen the last word. This week, we're celebrating the publication of my wife Rebecca's new book, "The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Author." Before Agatha Christie, there was Carolyn Wells, who wrote 82 mysteries in the early 20th century including most famously, "Murder in the Bookshop." Wells was an extraordinarily prolific and productive writer. She also penned volumes of poetry, young adult novels, and silent film plots for Thomas Edison. She completed a total of 180 books before her death in 1942, and yet she has been largely erased from literary history. Rebecca has set out to discover how and why that happened; part biography and part sleuthing narrative. "The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells" recovers the legacy of a brilliant writer who was considered one of the most talented women of her time. Available in hardcover, audio, and eBook editions at bookstores and libraries. This episode is sponsored by the 52-mile Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway; following New York State Route 28 through the heart of the Central Catskills. For maps, itineraries, and links to area restaurants, shops, and accommodations, visit sceniccatskills.com. Thanks also to the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

Gary Kusen  19:38  
Starting with the day we met Ralph Darmstadt [Reverend Darmstadt] at the supermarket in Margaretville, my wife saw him and they were trying to get volunteers and she signed us up. We had recently moved into the area full-time. We had been weekenders since the sixties and I still remember my wife walking away from the table and I was like ... "Jeez! What'd you get us involved with over there?" ... and she told us and I was a little reluctant at first because we were recently retired and we had a lot of stuff to do at home, but we met Ralph and some of the folks and we realized, you know, the need and we met some amazing people. But I'd like to say, "Ralph was probably the one person that inspired us both so much having grown up on Long Island in the Catholic Church." First time I actually met a man of God that I felt was my best friend. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, but growing up Catholic, I was always kind of intimidated by the church, having that, "Ralph, he was a regular guy living up here," we were isolated from our immediate families. This gives us an opportunity to help folks locally and we don't quite feel so bad about the fact that we can't see our immediate family and help them all the time.

Patricia Ruane  21:07  
I also happen to be a practicing Catholic and I believe in the pillars of social justice for the Catholic Church; one of which is something called subsidiarity. Subsidiarity means if there's an issue or problem, you start locally and solve that problem first with your family than with your neighbors and with your church or other kinds of community groups, and only later, after all those concentric circles have been exhausted; do you look for ... for help from government? For me, this is what we should be doing in this community and I can't say enough about how all the people that do this work and joy [the interaction] and they would say to us, "We get as much out of this as we give," so that if you're driving somebody to an appointment or to shopping in Kingston, that's an hour and a half in the car with a person, and in that time, you're having all kinds of conversations. One of the things that I do in which Gary does is we do intake on new clients, so I'll go into the house. I'll talk to the person. I'll find out some information about what they like and I'll get a sense of their living situation, and then it's my job in Shandaken, Ulster County, Gary's in Greene and Delaware to find the right volunteer to match with that person. So usually, I'm starting out with the person getting to know them a little, and then I'm saying, "Okay, this is the person that I can match with that person." So I recently had a little 90-year-old lady who is a retired special ed teacher from the New York Public Schools and she loved that I was a teacher at one point in my life and wanted to talk with me because she thinks I'm really going to understand everything that matters to her. I needed to move on, but matched her with another teacher, which was a happy match for her because that really was what she cared about, so it becomes a beautiful relationship. In one situation, it was a respite care where I was relieving a husband who couldn't leave his wife alone because she was suffering from dementia and she couldn't safely be by herself. We went on hikes and she loved hiking. She was very fit and it was fun for me to get outside with her and spend a couple of hours. It was good for me. It was good for her. It was good for the husband. We all had a great time and built a friendship around that and even though her dementia has gotten worse and worse. She's still delightful to be around, and so for me, it's a bonus to meet a family like that where you can offer them something really helpful, and at the same time, enjoy yourself, so it's not ... it's not a hardship.

Brett Barry  23:59  
How can seniors or friends of seniors or potential volunteers get in touch and and learn more?

Gary Kusen  24:07  
If they're computer literate, they can go to our website: catskillneighbors.org. All of our information is there. Our info phone is 845-280-0459. Leave a message, leave as much information as you can. Hopefully, it will also tell us where you live so we can direct the call.

Patricia Ruane  24:29  
Yeah, I think it's actually helpful to let your listeners know that volunteers are not sort of thrown out there by themselves. We do have a volunteer psychiatric nurse who backs us and helps us work through difficult situations. We also have social workers. So we're not trying to put people out there and let them fend. We really are trying to create a network for our volunteers, so that if they need help, it's there.

Brett Barry  25:04  
Client Sofie Solber Franzen for one feels extraordinarily lucky to have found the type of assistance ... Catskill Neighbors delivers.

Sofie Solber Franzen  25:13  
I've had the good fortune of connecting with people who take me marketing. You see, I never learned how to drive. So ... the young man's wife ... she takes me to Hannaford, which is on Route 375. They are exceptionally splendid people. I've never met anybody who wouldn't bend over backwards to please me. I'm extraordinarily lucky woman. With God's help I'm going to stick around for a while and I'm going to bore the hell out of everybody and that's pretty much ... that's pretty much my ... what I'm doing you now.

Brett Barry  25:57  
Kaatscast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating, so more people can find us. You can also stay connected at kaatscast.com and on Instagram @kaatscast. Production Intern: Juliana Merchant. Transcripts by J.K. Kazlauskas. Many thanks to the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation for their generous support of this podcast. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.