Kalispell Senior Center president reflects on life, faith, career

Steve Bicknell has, as he calls it, a certain type of patience. When he’s teaching senior citizens computer skills, a role in which he’s worked at the Kalispell Senior Center for about seven years, he doesn’t care how many times he has to explain how email works, or walk someone through using a search engine, or go through a set of directions again. For the senior center folks, “I don’t care how many times it comes up — I’ll be glad to show them again, and again, and again, so that they can learn,” he said on Friday afternoon at his office.

It’s a certain type of patience, though. Trying to teach a teenager?

“Put a 20-year-old in here, and in three minutes that person has pushed all my buttons and sent me flying,” he said with a laugh.

Laughter peppers much of the conversation with Bicknell, who is now the president of the Kalispell Senior Center. He has bright blue eyes, a quick side smile and an easy chuckle that winds down about every third sentence.

He also has a strong thread of service that runs throughout his life, taking shape in careers varying from rock-band tour manager to pastor, ranging from New England to Northwest Montana.

He wasn’t always so down on teenagers. Growing up in Derby Line, Vermont, just across the street from the Canadian border, Bicknell came of age in the 1960s, with the long hair to match. He loved the Grateful Dead, “all of those bands,” and smoking — a “hippie” just a few years too late for Woodstock. But though he didn’t play an instrument, he got his musical kicks by managing a local rock band in northern Vermont, helping them to book gigs around the region.

He tried college, he said, but that didn’t pan out. By his early 20s, he was working as a cab driver in Burlington, Vermont, when he stumbled upon the first of what he said were two major periods of reprioritization in his life.

More specifically, he was walking to his cab when he saw a pretty girl on the street corner.

“Hey, I’d talk to any pretty girl then,” he laughed.

She asked him to go see a movie with her, “The Cross and the Switchblade,” about a small-town preacher who worked with youth in New York City.

Though Bicknell was raised in a religious family, having attended a New England congregational church, he said until that point, he didn’t have a very strong faith.

After the movie, he began to dive into the Scriptures.

“That was the introduction of me into a drastically changed life,” he said.

He left New England for a Bible college outside of Denver, where he studied to become a pastor.

Along the way, he made his first visit to Montana as part of a service trip to the Lolo area. It was 1978, and there he met his future wife, Myrna.

The two married the next year in Myrna’s hometown of St. Regis. Bicknell had transferred to and graduated from Cedarville College in Ohio by then, and the new family moved to Mount Vision, New York, about 20 miles from Cooperstown.

Bicknell worked as a pastor at a church there, non-denominational but “Baptistic in belief,” he said. Meanwhile, he and Myrna raised three daughters, who now live in Libby, Spokane, and Bennington, Vermont.

After about 14 years in upstate New York, the family returned westward to Idaho, where Bicknell took on another pastoring job. And then came the second major reprioritization.

“My wife had been out of Montana long enough,” said Bicknell, so they moved to Libby. “When we moved out of Idaho and into Montana, there was a big shift.”

It’s a long story, he said, but he talked broadly about becoming prideful in his position as a pastor.

When he moved to Libby, “my whole focus just shifted in my life from pastoring to just focusing on helping the elderly,” he said.

Why the shift?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it was a heart change. The need came up — I saw it, I could meet it and I really took it from there.”

Part of it, he continued, was finding a better, more direct outlet for his spiritual commitment to helping others.

“That’s really what I find from the Scriptures, is serving others,” he said. “It has nothing to do with me, it’s all about serving others — how can I make their lives easier? How can I make it more pleasant? How can I make it more enjoyable?”

He started mowing lawns and shoveling snow for the elderly and widows who needed help. In 2011, he saw an ad requesting help teaching computer classes at the senior center. It felt right.

“I said, ‘I can do that,’” and within a couple years, he had worked up from teaching and custodial jobs to a board seat. He’s been president for two year now.

It’s not really about him, he promised.

“As a board, we are working together. It’s not a me/them. It’s us.

“We have an organization here of people who just enjoy doing something for other people and helping out where they can. And that’s what I really want here. It’s not me, it’s not the board. It’s the people, doing what they can to help each other and others,” he said.

Helping others is really what it’s always come down to, he said when asked what connects his many years pastoring to the work he does now such as managing board agendas and teaching people how to use their email.

“It’s the heart from one to the other that carries over, is really where it matters most,” he said. “Empathy, compassion, kindness and just working with people. I’m a people-person.”

One of his favorite parts of his role now is seeing the willingness of people to learn later in life.

“It’s so encouraging. When they get their first email,” he said, making a motion of an exploding orb around his head, “the lightbulb goes off, and it hits 220 [watts], and it’s phenomenal.”

Though he loves his current role, Bicknell said he’s also excited for the next step: moving back to Libby in April, so he and Myrna can be closer to one of their daughters and three of their six grandchildren.

It ties into what Bicknell described as the common threads of his life, the qualities that carry him through major life changes, from hippie to pastor, pastor to senior center president.

“I see the good, and I see the positive in things and that’s what kind of kept me going,” he said. “Instead of going ‘oh no, what’s next?’ I say, ‘something exciting is going to happen next. What is it?’”

Reporter Adrian Horton can be reached at 758-4439 or at ahorton@dailyinterlake.com