Small service group closes its doors as Red Cross consolidates

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

The last quilts at this fall’s sale mark the end of an era for a local Red Cross group.

Women involved with the Aylesford/ Auburn Red Cross service group are finishing the last of the work they started after last year’s sale. The provincial Red Cross has closed the group’s health equipment depot and petty cash, and the ladies are now disbanding as a whole.

“My mother and I used to knit for the fellows in World War I,” says group president Esther Chute of South Berwick. “Then, I’d go down to Grace Chute’s in Berwick, upstairs in her shop there was a room where we’d quilt through the ‘30s and ‘40s - anyone who wanted.”

All those quilts went to Halifax, were sorted and disbursed across the province for big fundraising sales.

“I remember going in to wait on people,” Chute says.

The Aylesford/ Auburn group itself started in a building behind Dr. Bezanson’s office in Aylesford.

“There were cups and saucers and we’d have tea. Then we moved down to my aunt, Hazel Wamboldt’s, and she used to ask me to come and help with the lunch. The first thing, I was the president and have ben ever since - maybe 50 years plus!”

Now, though, Chute says “all the ones I went with originally are dead, and a few new ones have come.

“It was getting down, though, to about seven or eight of us once a month.”

Still, the ladies’ sale brought in hundreds of dollars a year, and volunteer Erma Card in Nicholsville and her husband ran the group’s health equipment loan program steadily for the past 19 years.

“We had several people every week or so, and it wasn’t nine to five - I remember one family called at 11:30 one night, they're mother was coming home from the hospital - one way or the other - for Christmas,” Card says. “We were here, otherwise they would have had to go all the way into Kentville.”

Red Cross field associate Laura McNamara says that’s the issue now: the service centre in Kentville does carry equipment and offer programs for the region from Windsor to Annapolis (with depots in Bridgetown and Lawrencetown), and the Cards’ depot wasn’t really needed anymore.

“We’ve come up with a different way to work: historically, all the groups would have had equipment and a petty cash and, with that branch so close to our office, it wasn’t necessary,” McNamara says.

The Red Cross consolidated the Nicholsville depot, and that precipitated the Aylesford/ Auburn group’s decision to close, she says. The provincial Red Cross office also confirmed closure of a number of other depots in smaller communities.

“Things do change, but we do acknowledge this was a phenomenal, fantastic group of ladies who have done great work for many, many years,” McNamara says.

“They could continue to fundraise for us and bring the money in, or we’d come and collect it.

“We’re all about community development.”

Still, Chute says it is a sad ending for the group, and she’s already missing it - “just getting together.”

They’ve donated a number of unfinished projects and materials to the South Berwick “Time for all Things” charitable sewing group, the VON quilters and the Lions’ Christmas hamper collection and will hold one more sale this fall.

“We sent in a lot over the years,” Chute says. “They’re too big-business now, and I guess we’re awful small.”