A spirit of service

You’ll find her, any given Friday afternoon, plugging away at the piano. Over the buzz of conversation at the Kalispell Senior Center, you’ll hear familiar hymnals and old sing-along songs, as Ruth Pomeroy plays her way through the lunch hour. Afterwards, she’ll grab a bite to eat and hold court in the dining hall, greeting fellow volunteers, seniors and employees at the Flathead Agency on Aging, a place where she has donated so many of the hours in her twilight years.

Pomeroy is quick to point out that she doesn’t move as quickly as she used to, but the walker seems like a diversion. At 90 years old, she still glides smoothly across the room and laughs easily, blue eyes sparkling. And she’s still logging upwards of 100 volunteer hours a month helping guide seniors with Medicare claims and fraud protection at the Agency on Aging — a remarkable contribution that has earned her national recognition.

Last October, the AARP honored Pomeroy with the 2017 Andrus Award for Community Service — the Association’s most prestigious volunteer award, with one winner per state — for her work as a State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) Medicare Counselor and a Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP) presenter. The ceremony in Helena celebrated her as “a person who has given of herself to make an important difference in the lives of others. Her spirit of service has left an indelible mark on communities all around Montana.”

Pomeroy has a much less lofty take. “I really don’t think that what I do is all that great — it’s just what I do,” she said. “But it was nice to be recognized.”

She doesn’t pause on the recognition for long — there is too much to know about Medicare, too many misconceptions to dispel, too many potential scams to guard against. When she speaks of her work, she’s full of details, anecdotes and nuggets of advice — how to avoid paying extra for Medicare Part B, how to navigate the Medicare.gov website or which email scams have been common lately.

One conversation on Medicare counseling and 101 classes, and it’s clear that, as she says, “I care. I can talk to people and let them know, ‘hey, I’m not here to judge you, because you don’t want that. I’m here to help you and explain it to you.’ And I’ve helped a lot of people, doing this for seven years.”

Her humility and commitment to the work extend much further back than that, back to a colorful life as a rancher, bank teller and business manager. Waking up, working and helping people has always kept her motivated. “Work is the only thing I know,” she said. “It’s what keeps me going.”

Work is what initially brought her family to Montana. Her parents, like many early settlers of the state, followed family to Northwest Montana as homesteaders in 1918. Pomeroy, the youngest of three siblings, was born nine years later, in Eureka.

The self-described “country girl” grew up on a cattle ranch in Fortine. In the fifth grade, she sent a Valentine to an older boy she liked in school. While her girlfriends came up empty-handed, Pomeroy’s crush stuck around. They sat next to each other on the bus and went to church together. When WWII broke out and he went to the South Pacific, “I wrote to him all that time. And then he came home and we got married.”

Pomeroy and her husband, Bill, took over the family ranch, where they raised three sons and made a living primarily in the Christmas tree industry. Always a learner and never one to stay still, Pomeroy sought a job in Eureka to supplement the family income.

At that time, “most of the women were still staying home. I was a little different. We felt that if I could go out and make a little bit of money then my husband could work on the ranch and we could make it that way.”

She got a job at a grocery store in Eureka — a small operation where they “barely had enough change on hand.” But with the construction of Libby Dam, opportunities for growth were at hand.

Investors from the Flathead arrived to start a bank and were looking for local residents to hire. Pomeroy was taken on as a teller, but the operation was small enough that “we were all cross-trained. So we could step in — not the loan officers, they were a cut above us — but we girls could move back and forth. So I learned the banking business.”

Pomeroy always had a knack for numbers, but the experience at the bank taught her how to work with money, balance ledgers and keep track of expense.

She leaned on that experience when circumstances forced her away from the ranch. After her husband was injured in an accident, the couple decided to move to Missoula to be closer to medical treatment.

“Here I am, a country girl in a big city, and I thought, ‘how am I going to get a job?’” she remembered. After spending time for Bill’s surgeries at St. Patrick hospital in Missoula, she said, “I thought, ‘well, they must have an office in that hospital.’ So I went there ... someone in payroll had just quit. And when they found out I’d been working at a bank, I got hired.”

From there, she continued to learn on the job and step in where help was needed — at the hospital’s employee-run credit union, at a friend’s Toyota dealership, at a construction company and then back at St. Patrick.

The drive to help didn’t cease when she retired in 1992 and moved to Kalispell with her ailing husband. After seeing on a church bulletin the need for a pianist at the Immanuel Lutheran Home, she said to her husband, with trademark gumption, “well, I can do that.” She played two church services every Sunday, along with various other events, for 19 years, until a broken hip from a fall limited her movement.

But it did not stop her from continuing the work with the Agency on Aging that she began in 2010. After seeing a Daily Inter Lake article about seniors struggling to make sense of Medicare, she felt that her hospital and bank background could be of service. She’s been advising as a Medicare counselor ever since.

Though she is scaling back — “I’m old!” she explains — she continues to have a hand in the Agency on Aging’s Medicare 101 classes and social life at the Senior Center, centered by the work of helping others and her Christian faith.

“It’s what I am,” she said. “It’s part of the reason that I can relate so well to people here. Because you learn to love people. Somebody comes in here and they stink, they’re all shaggy, [but] you don’t turn up your nose. You just love them.”

Love and service remain her focus, even in a conversation about her AARP award. The agency is in critical need of volunteers, she explained.

“We need volunteers for the fraud, and we need volunteers for Medicare 101. But we desperately need volunteers because our funding is iffy,” Pomeroy said.

As she settles into a less-busy retirement, she hopes her story inspires someone else’s can-do generosity.

“Maybe there’s somebody out there who might feel like I did, thinking ‘that’s something I could do.’”