Giver receives much-needed present

Chris Jordan/Daily Inter Lake

Mary Wirz sorts mail at Kalispell Regional Medical Center. Wirz, a retired nurse, still does volunteer work at the hospital. 2004 will be a year to remember for Wirz since her family gave her a new car for Christmas.

By CAMDEN EASTERLING

The Daily Inter Lake

Mary Wirz is used to giving, but this Christmas she was on the receiving end of a much-needed gift.

Wirz, a retired obstetrics nurse, is a hospital volunteer and she also raises money for charities. She is the type of person who would sooner give away her money than spend it on herself.

But now, thanks to her daughter and son-in-law, she is the owner of a new car.

A shiny 2004 Dodge Intrepid sits in the driveway of her Kalispell house. It replaces the 1985 Nissan truck that had more than 200,000 miles on it and a number of quirks, such as a stubborn defroster, that accumulated during the 20 years Wirz drove it.

"Basically we knew her truck was old," said her daughter, Heather Roth of Kalispell, "and she couldn't afford" a new car.

Wirz, 61, had been thinking about replacing her truck for some time. She asked Roth and her husband, Jamie Roth, to help her find a used car she planned to purchase herself. There was nothing wrong with the truck, but it was old and had more than its share of miles.

"It's like riding a 900-year-old horse," she said of the Nissan. "You just don't take them over 40 acres, you take them maybe five."

Roth, 36, and her husband live in Kalispell and were happy to help look for cars for Wirz. What they didn't tell her, though, was they intended to buy it for her.

"She's always been such a great mom to me and always done everything that she could for me," Roth said. "We wanted to do it now that were in a position to help."

Roth is a stay-at-home mom to the couple's 1-year-old daughter, Kaiya, and Jamie, 31, works in construction. They found the Intrepid at a local used car dealer. The car had about 29,000 miles on it when they bought it, and they got a good deal on it, Roth said. But she was too excited to wait until Christmas to give her mother the car.

The day after Thanksgiving she told her mom she had a Christmas gift for her and placed the key in her hand. Wirz had asked for a new TV, so she was puzzled by the key.

"I pointed her to the car," her daughter said, "and said, 'That's yours.' And she was just blown away."

"I was really overwhelmed. I couldn't say anything," Wirz said. "Thank you just seemed such an inadequate thing."

The family normally gives moderately priced gifts such as clothing to each other for Christmas, so a car was a huge surprise, Wirz said. And the 2004 Intrepid is a luxury vehicle compared to her truck, which was a step up from its predecessor, a Volkswagen with holes in the floor.

"This car is like, 'Wow,'" Wirz said, her eyes opening wide in amazement. "You get in the car and the heater works and the defroster works right away."

Wirz has been frugal all her life, she said.

"I was always brought up that you use something until you can't use any more," she said, "and then you mend it."

Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a teacher. The family philosophy was to look for creative uses for all objects and to avoid wasting anything. Wirz didn't mind that approach save for one task: mending socks. That task became a symbol of economic status to Wirz.

"The height of richness," she said of her childhood mind-set, "was not having to darn your socks."

Wirz went into nursing after she graduated from high school and later moved to Montana where she started working at the Kalispell hospital in 1969. She retired in 2002 and now volunteers there several hours a week as a messenger and receptionist. Her definition of richness has changed since she was younger.

"Now it's being able to buy whatever you want without having to look at the price tag," she said.

As an example of that cavalier approach to shopping, she mentions buying gifts for family and friends without having to think too much about the price. But when asked what the last thing she bought for herself was, Wirz appears stumped.

"Well, I buy food for myself," she said.

She thinks about it a while longer, then replies, "An electric toothbrush." She bought it about a year ago for about $28.

Wirz not only avoids spending money frivolously, she also raises money by recycling. For about 15 years she has collected pop tabs for the Ronald McDonald House charity. She gathers tabs from her own cans and those from the hospital. She spends about an hour and a half each week pulling tabs and crushing cans.

The money from the tabs amounts to about $100 a year, which isn't much, she said. But it's what she can do. Over the course of 15 years, that means Wirz has donated about $1,500 to the Ronald McDonald organization. She also recycles the crushed cans for cash. That money goes into the hospital's "sunshine" fund that employees use to buy cards and flowers for workers who are ill.

Wirz also recycles newspapers for cash that she gives to the Humane Society. Her recycling donations are on top of the $10-$20 she gives to the Humane Society and other animal causes each month.

Her upbringing ingrained in her that just about anything can have another use, so for many years Wirz also saved objects such as plastic pudding cups and cardboard toilet paper rolls that she donated to local schools for craft projects. The schools have since stopped accepting the cups and rolls, probably because she gave them more than they could possibly use, she said.

Wirz is keeping her old truck to make runs to the recycling center, but for the most part she'll drive around town in the luxury of her new car.

Reporter Camden Easterling can be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at ceasterling@dailyinterlake.com