Photograph by George Sakkestad
Dorothy Daley McCrum, 81, has helped seniors in Sunnyvale for many years.
By CRISTY SHAUCK
When Dorothy Daley McCrum enters a room, heads still turn. At 81, the former modeling-school owner and operator stands erect, all 5 feet, 11 inches of her, from her softly curled and cropped silver hair to her size-11 feet.
The Sunnyvale senior has been a board member of the Older Adult Resource Center at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View for 10 years.
The center offers seminars, lectures and an extensive library pertaining to senior issues.
"I'm proud to be on the board," McCrum says. "We make important curriculum decisions. We help seniors maintain good health. Children of older adults also use the library."
Nadine Lewis, the center's resource coordinator, says, "Dorothy's a marvelous lady. She's given several lectures here. We received 61 glowing evaluations from people who attended "Love Yourself," her self-esteem lecture. She made the cover of our last newsletter with an article on her experience with MRI."
Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, is a method of creating highly detailed anatomical images with magnetic fields and radio waves, instead of x-rays.
In the past, McCrum also served on the RSVP (Retired Senior Volunteer Program) Advisory Council, was twice president of the Senior Council Committee in Sunnyvale in the late 1970s and 1980s, and served as a senior legislator from 1984 to 1986.
Flashing a spirit-lifting smile, she says of her decades of volunteer work, "It gives me the satisfaction of feeling that I'm being of service to the community."
Originally from Chicago, McCrum, her husband and four children moved to California hoping to improve the health of a daughter who contracted polio at the age of 18 months during a 1950 epidemic.
With the aid of braces, Christine not only walked, she drove a car with automatic transmission when she reached her teens and attended regular classes during an era when "mainstreaming" disabled children was discouraged. But she died from complications of polio before reaching adulthood.
A Sunnyvale resident since 1971, McCrum enjoys socializing with people of every generation. She believes this kind of interaction is so important for older people that in 1992 she convinced the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors to declare the week beginning with the third Sunday in May as Intergenerational Week. The board awarded her a plaque for her efforts.
"As a result, many of the senior centers in our county hold an intergenerational celebration," McCrum says.
Evidently the idea caught on in a big way, because an intergenerational extravaganza will take place at the county fairgrounds in June.
Far from retired, McCrum free-lances her writing, contributing an opinion column to Prime Monthly, a magazine for people over 40. She has self-published two small books, The Magic of Perfume and Overcoming Procrastination.
Visitors, take note: Request a tour of McCrum's back yard, a virtual potpourri bowl heady with the scent of pink, lavender, salmon, yellow and crimson rose bushes--some of them as lovely as the lady herself.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, May 29, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.