Johns takes up challenge after reading staff writer's column

By Sean Dalton
Heritage Newspapers

In the newspaper business, unless you get a phone call from someone criticizing your work or letters to the editor in response to a specific article, you often wonder if what you’re writing is having an impact.

Every once in awhile we get thank you cards or a reader fills out a questionnaire (yes, we do actually see those and take them to heart so keep the feedback coming), but something completely different happened to me last week when I picked up the phone.

Dexter resident Patti Johns called and shared an extraordinary bit of feedback in response to my Jan. 7 editorial, “Make Faith in Action your 2010 resolution.”

Since reading my editorial at the outset of the year, she has been shopping once each month for Faith in Action. After her grocery shopping is done, she takes a separate basket in arm and fills it with $25 to $30 worth of items that FIA desperately needs to address the seemingly invisi-ble needy families of Chelsea and Dexter.

“There was just something about the way that you wrote it,” Johns told me.

She almost used that issue to light her fireplace before fishing it out of the kindling pile to give the column a second read, which I guess did the trick.

“I knew I had to start doing it … I said, ‘You have to do this,’ to myself,” she added.

As I talked to Johns it became obvious to me that she possessed a key component within her character that capitalized on my writing.

Johns was on aid to dependent children 30 years ago, just like my own mother.

Like my own mother she worked hard to improve her lot in life and eventually got back on her own two feet. She found herself in a situation where she and her daughter and her new husband and his two children united as a family and thrived.

The thought had never really occurred to her until recently, but what if she hadn’t had that support early on?

President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program was putting food on the ta-ble and clothes on her daughter’s back, while friends and neighbors were helping to fill in when she couldn’t be there, like when her daughter needed to be taken to or picked up from the bus stop when she needed to be at work.

“I’ve been there where I didn’t have any money to put in the gas tank,” Johns said. “At one point I thought my husband was paying the house payments, which he wasn’t. By the third month they said they’re coming to take our house away.”

Despite being as “poor as poor can be,” Johns said she wasn’t previously aware of the need that FIA tries to meet in the county.

Like so many residents, she had a hard time seeing through a surface of well kept lawns, a polished downtown district and strongly supported schools to the truth: no matter where you are there are people who need a hand.

Johns said she has learned a lot about FIA since extending that hand. She has gotten even more adamant about sale shopping, trying to make her $30 stretch to $35 or $40 worth of canned goods, crackers and toiletries.

“It’s just something now that I think I have to do every month,” Johns said. “Right now a lot of people have lost their jobs and some of them are getting them back, but not everybody.”

As a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Johns sees another dimension to need – people who can’t afford their medications.

“We see a lot of people who can’t afford their medicine who go off of it,” she said. “We contact a social worker because they really aren’t making it. Patients become quiet and discontinue (their medications) because they don’t have the money to pay for it.”

Poverty is a complicated issue that affects all areas of someone’s life. I wonder how many of those patients that Johns came across were skipping their medication so they could afford to eat.

Perhaps the food she is donating each month is sparing a family somewhere in Dexter or Chelsea from having to make such difficult decisions.

Maybe Johns is providing that last nudge of support for some young mother somewhere going through the same thing that she went through.

I would like to personally congratulate Patti Johns for bolstering my faith in a number of ways.Hopefully folks will recognize her at the grocery store and be inspired to take a basket in arm for the sake of the county’s invisible needy.