St. Jude's Ranch volunteers mark legacy of lending a hand

Minnesota couple wrap up 14 years of donating time

fred couzens/viewLloyd Bardwell repairs a hose fitting at St. Jude?s Ranch for Children in Boulder City. fred couzens/viewLloyd and Rachel Bardwell spend a minute with a furry helper cat in the mail room at St. Jude?s Ranch for Children. Rachel works in the mail room during her seasonal volunteer schedule.

Lloyd and Rachel Bardwell returned to their home outside Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., this spring after completing their 14th year of service at St. Jude's Ranch for Children, making them the longest-serving volunteers at the Boulder City facility.

The 77-year-old retired Ford Motor Co. skilled trades worker and his wife, a 74-year-old mother of their four grown sons, spent 16 weeks at St. Jude's starting in January.

Lloyd helped in doing routine but necessary maintenance work on the grounds and buildings, while Rachel sat in the mailroom sifting through thousands of envelopes and packages.

While there, the Mounds View, Minn., couple stayed in the St. Richard's Retreat Center -- a 17-room "on-site motel" capable of housing up to 30 people at one time -- where the Bardwells cooked their own meals and washed their own clothes, receiving no pay for their volunteer work other than being given a place to sleep and bathe.

"You should see this place when it's full," said Rachel, while sitting at a communal table in the living room area. "It's like a zoo. You try not to be in the kitchen all at the same time."

For the first six years, Lloyd helped out in the mailroom, helping to deliver the semi-truckloads of mail -- most of it contained Christmas cards for recycling and soup labels -- the ranch would receive daily.

After that, he switched to buildings and grounds maintenance, of which he said, "it's definitely a challenge."

"We'd go in and fix up the cottages where there were holes in the walls and doors, the faucets were dripping and other plumbing repairs," he said. "Now, we need volunteers in the summer because they've only got two people to cover 40 acres. I could put a few more guys right to work now. They could cut a dead tree down, fix a major leak in the irrigation system, provide supports for trees blowing in windy conditions, kill weeds, and put the small trees on irrigation clocks. Maintenance is just limping along right now."

Rachel, on the other hand, sees a lot of action in the mailroom, sometimes sitting across from her friend Tillie Lucero of Boulder City.

"When we get the envelopes filled with cards sent for recycling, we open the cards and look for money or labels," she said. "A lot of times when we get the soup labels, we have to cut out the UPC code because that's what we need. For the past three months, we've had five or six people working at this when we used to have 20. The mail comes from all over the country; a hundred packages a day."

When it comes to running a group-home complex for up to 59 children and young adults to age 21, the abundance of work requires more than just the cadre of professionals in the front office.

To keep costs down so more funds can go toward program needs, volunteers fill in where there's a requirement for labor-intensive work.

According to Jennifer Becker, the community relations coordinator for St. Jude's, the campus has six couples representing 12 seasonal volunteers and six full-time and 10 or more local volunteers, but they could always use more.

"The seasonal volunteers like the Bardwells are probably the most amazing volunteers we have on campus," Becker said. "These volunteers make a huge difference in the kids' lives."

The Bardwells learned about St. Jude's while on a trip to Kona, Hawaii, where they met up with a group called SOWER, or Servants on Wheels Ever Ready, which was helping a program called Youth with a Mission.

When Lloyd and Rachel first got to St. Jude's, volunteers were forbidden from mixing or interacting with the children, but that has changed since the new chief executive officer took over two years ago.

"Before, we were not allowed to be near the children, but Christine changed that," said Rachel in reference to Christine Spadafor, St. Jude's current chief executive officer. "Things have changed dramatically."

Lloyd even added that he's seen a better caliber of house parents these days than in the past, some of whom he said, "shouldn't have been here."

To assure St. Jude's is accepting volunteer services from reputable persons, all volunteers are fingerprinted and go through background checks conducted by the FBI.

"We have to protect the children," Becker said. "After all, we want to get volunteers involved with children because they have a lot to give to the children."

To aid in the campus' overall security effort, St. Jude's will be installing automated security gates at its two entrances by the end of June that will be open during the day, but closed during the night when a security access code will be necessary to open them.

Even though central Minnesota is a nice place to be away from in the winter, Rachel gets more out of volunteering at St. Jude's than just relief from shoveling snow.

"I've been volunteering more years than he has," she said. "What I get out of it is just the satisfaction of helping somebody else. They need help, and we're glad to give any little thing we can do."