Judith Hoddinott wasn’t more than five-years-old when she first recognized a selfless act of kindness.
Visiting grandma in Galveston, Texas, Hoddinott and Grandmother Louise Flagg took a walk to see “Miss Haddie,” an elderly black woman who had been sick for some time.
“We travelled from one end to the other; from a wealthy area to an impoverished area via an alley. I had never travelled that far down the alley,” Hoddinott remembers.
Flagg brought a home-cooked pie for Miss Haddie.
“Somehow she (Grandma) knew this woman and knew she wasn’t doing well. I had a sense their paths wouldn’t have normally crossed.”
As the woman stood on her porch, that was deteriorating and falling apart before their eyes, Flagg simply asked, “Are you feeling better?”
“That was the first time I had seen a real act of volunteerism in its truest sense. I’ll never forget that.”
Volunteerism is something that has always been strong in Hoddinott’s life.
She watched it in her grandparents, like with Miss Haddie, and with her parents, William and Odie Dickens, as well.
“It was the way I was raised,” she admits. “We were always doing something.”
Growing up in St. Louis, Mo., the railroad tracks literally divided the north and the south, the poor and rich, the black and the whites. But it didn’t stop the Dickens family from stepping over that division. Her parents did much work across the tracks including building a black baptist church by themselves. Later, Hoddinott’s mother — who at 84, today, is still very much involved in volunteering — founded a rape and abuse crisis center in Jefferson, Mo.
As Hoddinott grew she got involved in her own volunteer activities such as becoming a Candy Striper at the local hospital.
Or in high school she took a trip with a church youth group to a Navajo reservation at the Four Corners of Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. There she provided manual labor including constructing a runway for a general practitioner to fly in, since the reservation had had no prior medical treatment available to them. Hoddinott and the church group also spliced together five trailers to make a school house.
Hoddinott, who once considered the Peace Corps, went back to the reservation for a summer in between college semesters at St. Louis University, where she earned her nursing degree.
It was an adventure, though some of the time she recalls as a “misadventure,” like when she got caught in a sand storm, picked up off the ground and twirled around.
But on this second visit, Hoddinott was asked to come to a medical clinic where she helped a diabetic woman who was having a reaction to too much insulin. Not to long after, Hoddinott was asked to join a two-year program to become a Medicine Woman.
Medicine women, in the Native American culture, visit the sick, armed with a belt and sacks of colored sand. They diagnose the illness and identify the best god to enlist to move this evil spirit that attacks away. They then create sand paintings, typically placed underneath the bed of the patient, of the gods.
In this career, Hoddinott said she would have earned $4,000 a year, if provided with a horse; or $2,000 a year, without a horse. The average salary in the reservation then was $600 a year.
But Hoddinott was concerned about living there by herself and turned down the career choice.
She still dedicated her life to the medical field, though, as a nurse. Her career since 1975 has led her to titles as Director of Organ Procurement for the state of Missouri and Senior Coordinator for Barnes Hospital at Washington University. She is currently employed with Gift of Life, the state’s organ donor program where she has worked in evaluating donors in southeast Michigan.
Hoddinott, 52, is also busy with her own business, Faces in Time, which sells commissioned portraits and house drawings. (Hoddinott first pursued art at the University of Kansas, but found the environment was not for her.)
No matter how busy one is — Hoddinott’s father was Director of International Affairs for a chemical company at the time he built an addition on the afore-mentioned church to be used for the Boy Scouts — Hoddinott says if it’s important, anyone can find time to volunteer.
With her two children, Allison, 15, and Susan, 13, growing older, Hoddinott said her time has started to free up.
So she recently began to look around at what activities she could volunteer for in Clarkston, where she has lived with husband Mark for the past 15 years.
Through Clarkston residents Chuck and Judge Dana Fortinberry, she heard of the Children’s Leukemia Foundation (CLF) as well as SCAMP, a summer camp for special needs children and young adults.
For SCAMP, Hoddinott was able to put her artistic talents to use as she donated drawings for a fundraiser and yearly auction as well as suggested the idea and supervised a ballet class for the day camp.
For CLF, she created drawings of actual children living with leukemia to be placed on the organization’s brochures.
“A common theme in volunteering is the involvement of others. I don’t do this in a vacuum,” she said, noting the help of others like the Fortinberrys who directed her to the two organizations or the people of Frames ‘N Art who help frame her donated art at no charge.
“My interest in volunteering is echoed in a lot of groups in Clarkston and I’m sure in North Oakland County,” Hoddinott said. “It’s very comforting and pleasant how many people are actively involved all the time, outside of their work hours. I like being in their company. They are very happy and pleasant people. Being around the flavor of kindness and consideration is very reassuring.”
Whether it’s collecting goods for Lighthouse Emergency Services; dressing up, with Mark, as Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus to pass out 300 wrapped gifts to children and various hospitals on Christmas day in St. Louis; or donating portraits to those who have lost a loved one, Hoddinott says, “The most generous gift, it really is, is people doing for others.”