Local Heros
Marie Walters
“Credit a kind heart and a friendly town”
The news is filled these days with stories of cutbacks, retrenching and downsizing. Everyone agrees that money is tight. But don’t tell that to Marie Walters.
The 84-year-old Port Alberni widow has opened her purse–and her heart–to her community in a unique display of charity. Mrs. Walters announced last month that, after she dies, her home should be sold and the proceeds donated to the Alberni Valley Communtiy Foundation.
Mrs. Walters has no children and, aside from minor bequest to nieces and nephews and the SPCA, was looking for something positive to do with her estate. “People in this community have been good to me,” Mrs. Walters says.
Mrs. Walters was born in Biggar, Sasketchewan, in 1912. She worked in B.C. in 1936 and worked as a cook in Campbell River, Zeballos and Vancouver. She and her husband moved to Port Alberni in 1948 and built their home in 1958. After he died in 1964, she took in boarders and cleaned offices to make ends meet.
“I’ve worked hard all my life. I’ve always paid my bills and never been a burder to anyone,” she says. “I would come home at 11:30 at night and make lunches for my six boarders, who were all working different shifts. You can’t become rich having boarders, but I’ve made some friends. The boarders have been very good to me.”
Many of the people who have lived with her still visit, along with their children. “I’m lucky, I really am.”
In recent years, she has had to use a walker to get around her home, and has employed a housekeeper. She makes her own meals and knits and crochets, sitting in her front room by her picture window.
Last Christmas Eve, she had a scare that led her to realize how much she owed to others. She had been feeling tired and ill and that evening while walking in her kitchen, she blacked out. She was on the floor for 21 hours. “I couldn’t get up. I had delusions that I was actually in bed. It was frightening.”
Fortunately, a neighbour realized something was wrong when she failed to answer the phone. She was taken to hospital and spent five weeks recovering from her fall.
Short afterwards, she contacted her friend Terence Whyte, to draw up her will. Mr. Whyte first met Mrs. Walters 10 years ago when he was director of a seniors’ housing complex across the street from her house. “She would come to the dances,” he says. “I’ve always been impressed by how friendly she is. She touched a lot of lives in small ways.”
Mrs Walters wanted to help the community with her estate. Mr. Whyte, a director of the new Alberni Valley Community Foundation, suggested that she leave the proceeds from the sale of her home–about $50,000–to the foundation. She agreed.
The foundation will form a trust fund name for Mrs. Walters and its directors will use interest from the fund for grants to various groups. “Mrs. Walters’ donation is a real shot in the arm for us,” Mr. Whyte says.
On March 28, the foundation launched its first fundraising drive by presenting Mrs. Walters with a plaque thanking her for the donation. Her bequest became frontpage news in the city. “I don’t see the need for all the fuss,” Mrs Walters says. “A lot of people have been phoning me, saying that what I did was a wonderful idea.”
“One good deed leads to another. I have found that to be true. I believe in helping good things to happen.”
- Rick Hiebert, British Columbia Report, April 22, 1996, p. 19
Watch this space for stories of other Alberni Valley citizens whose generosity has made a difference.