Togus, the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs medical center in Augusta, will honor Muriel “Willie” Wilhelm, a Bristol resident, on April 12, 2011 for surpassing 10,000 hours of volunteer service.
Wilhelm, 88, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, volunteers every other Tuesday at Togus and every Wednesday at Skidompha Library.
“I just love books,” Wilhelm said in a Dec. 1 interview at Skidompha Library. “I love to read and the first thing I do when I move any place is get a library card.”
When Wilhelm relocated to Bristol after her retirement about thirty years ago, she visited Skidompha Library and saw a sign advertising for volunteers. Later, for nine summers, she would manage the Skidompha Secondhand Book Shop.
Over the years, Wilhelm became a permanent part of the institution. Five bricks on the library’s front walk bear her name and the names of each of her cats. A brick on the rear walk commemorates her 10,000-plus hours of service.
Wilhelm was already a veteran volunteer when Pam Gormley, the Director of Skidompha Library, arrived 12 years ago.
“[Wilhelm] is smart. She is quick. She believes in and puts in a full day’s work and never leaves a job until it’s finished,” Gormley said.
Due to Wilhelm’s relentless attention to detail, “She does a lot of the detail-oriented jobs that require complete accuracy,” Gormley said. “She is tireless.”
“We have about 100 volunteers,” Gormley said. “We wouldn’t be open without them.” Wilhelm is the longest-serving volunteer at Skidompha, she said.
“[Wilhelm] has a wonderful sense of humor and I really enjoy working with her,” Gormley said.
As a volunteer, Wilhelm sends overdue notices to members, verifies new memberships, shelves and organizes magazines, “decommissions” old books when the library needs shelf space and tackles a variety of special projects.
“When you volunteer, you do what you’re told to do. If you don’t like it, you volunteer somewhere else,” Wilhelm said. Her work at the Togus library is similar, although recently, due in part to improving technology, Wilhelm cut her hours from every week to every other week. “They can’t find enough for me to do,” she said.
In April, Togus will give Wilhelm an engraved plaque for her 10,000 hours of service – the equivalent of nearly five years of full-time employment. Recognition of volunteers begins at the 100-hour mark and the 10,000-hour plaque is “the last award they give,” Wilhelm said.
“Recently I’ve been working in the archives and I’ve found people who had 20,000 hours,” Wilhelm said. The volunteers beyond the 20,000-hour mark, unlike Wilhelm, lived at Togus and volunteered on a daily basis. Wilhelm’s commute, in comparison, lasts nearly two hours round trip.
“[Wilhelm is] an amazing lady,” Peggy Baird, Educational Director at Togus, said. “She’s definitely the most experienced volunteer we have.”
Wilhelm’s energy defies her age. “She’s up and down ladders constantly,” Baird said. “I can’t keep the woman on the floor.”
Wilhelm is “knowledgeable” and a “wonderful asset” for Togus, Baird said. “I hope she can do 10,000 more hours.”
Originally from New Jersey (“a good place to be from”) Wilhelm graduated from Russell-Sage College in Troy, N.Y. in 1943 with a degree in physical education. She taught for a year after graduation but didn’t like it. During her Thanksgiving break, she signed up for the U.S. Marine Corps.
After her lone year of teaching, in 1944, she began her service as a clerical worker at the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Wilhelm advanced to the rank of Sergeant. “I wasn’t tall enough to be an officer – nor old enough,” she said. “Eventually I was old enough to be an officer but I was never tall enough.”
In 1944, the U.S. Marine Corps required officers to stand at least five feet, six inches tall. Later, the requirement would shrink to five feet, four inches – little help to the petite Wilhelm, who stands, by her own estimation, “just a couple of eighths of an inch under five feet.”
After two years and the end of World War II, Wilhelm left the U.S. Marine Corps and went to work for the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. “Eventually I got bored, I guess, and decided to go back to school,” she said.
Wilhelm got her master’s degree in Guidance and Student Personnel Administration from the Teachers College of Columbia University in the mid-1950s. She stayed in school, pursuing her doctorate until, for financial reasons, she decided a Ph.D. “wasn’t going to be worth it.”
“I got my next degree, which they call a professional diploma and then I quit,” Wilhelm said. For the rest of her professional career, Wilhelm worked at a variety of institutions of higher learning across New Jersey and New York, eventually retiring from a position as the Registrar at Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
After retirement, Wilhelm contacted a realtor and began planning her move to Maine. “I said, ‘This is how much I have to spend’ and [the realtor] said, ‘Okay, you’re not going to live in Camden,'” Wilhelm said.
As soon as she stepped foot in her Bristol home, she knew it was right, she said. “The whole thing was a Marine Corps deal,” she said, as Wilhelm, the owners of the house and the realtor were all former Marines.
Wilhelm first visited Maine at the age of 10. “My piano teacher and her husband back in New Jersey bought a camp on Orr’s Island,” she said. In 1951, Wilhelm’s father had a summer cottage built on West Southport.
Wilhelm has two sisters in Maine, one at Schooner Cove in Damariscotta and one in Augusta. “We just all decided we were going to retire to Maine,” she said.
Wilhelm’s accomplishments extend beyond her volunteerism. For four years, while living in Troy, N.Y., she was the President of the Russell-Sage College Alumnae Association. In 1983, she won the Crockett Medal Award.
According to the Russell Sage College website, the award, also known as the Dean Doris L. Crockett award for distinguished service, is “the highest award given by the Alumnae Association.”
Candidates must show “loyalty to and consistent interest in the College,” demonstrate “outstanding achievement in a chosen career field or in significant community service” and maintain a “high level of integrity of character.”
“I still serve as my class correspondent and my class agent for collecting contributions,” Wilhelm said.
Wilhelm also pursues hobbies, which, in addition to her professed love for reading (“I’m a mystery buff”), include archaeology and bird watching.
For two weeks every summer since the early 1990s, she has volunteered alongside Walpole archaeologist Tim Dinsmore during the annual field school he operates in conjunction with the Damariscotta River Association. “I sort of suspect last summer was my last summer doing that,” she said.
Dinsmore called Wilhelm “an inspiration” and a “very hard worker.”
“She’s probably put in at least 5000 hours with me,” Dinsmore said. In addition to “a tremendous amount of work” on summer excavations, Wilhelm joins Dinsmore every Friday throughout the winter to process artifacts in his Walpole laboratory.
“I hope I can do the same things at her age,” Dinsmore said. At 88, Wilhelm often works in silence alongside “people in their thirties and forties whining and complaining about their back pain,” he said.
“I consider her like an adopted grandmother,” Dinsmore said.
Wilhelm enjoys bird-watching, whether with the Audobon Society or as a participant in the annual Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology Project FeederWatch, in which she and others across the U.S.A. contribute data about the species of birds visiting their birdfeeders.
“I keep out of mischief,” Wilhelm said.
Wilhelm will turn 89 Jan. 6. “I don’t believe it… except when I try to get up in the morning and I creak,” she said. “My goal at one time was to live to see the millennium change and I made that without any trouble.”