By Bob Buddemeier

As a retirement community FHC (Frequently Heard Complaint), it’s right up there with mental or physical disability and the quality of the food.  After a lifetime of collecting really cool stuff, people find out that their offspring have zero interest in inheriting it. It’s bad enough when the “it” is Grandma’s set of crystal goblets or Uncle Milt’s collection of lapel pins.  It’s when the ungrateful wretches don’t give a rat’s patootie about family history and connections that it really gets personal.

If you are like most RVMers, you have several shoeboxes of family memorabilia that you have somehow been unable to downsize.  With the recent birth of a great-grandson came the realization that I am an ancestor.  And the realization I was the last family member alive to have known my father’s parents and all of his siblings and their families. And further, I had the part realization, part assumption that nobody cared.

BUT!! Lo and behold, there appeared granddaughter Remy, encouraging me to donate a tube full of spit because she wanted to find out about my/her DNA. It turned out that she had become intrigued by family history because of her other grandfather, who had, shall we say, been cast in a different mold.

Hoo Boy, I thought, here’s a live one – package those papers!  But then the laggard but logical part of my brain perked up and said:  “Waitaminute.  What is Remy going to make of a bunch of unlabeled photos and letters signed with initials?  It needs context and organization.”  Oh, yeah.

So, I found myself enrolled in 3 online genealogy sites, and struggling to crawl up the trunk of my beetle-infested family tree. It was surprisingly hard going – but I was not alone.  To my wonder and amazement, Rita Derbas appeared, riding out of the west and wearing the hat (she has many) of the lead sprout of the RVM genealogical tree (a.k.a. the Trace Your Ancestors Genealogy Group (TYAGG) – see the activities and Amenities page in MyRVM, or Bits & Pieces).  Rita has been digging into her roots for over 40 years, and is part of the group that started TYAGG back in the pre-covid days.

Rita pointed out some tree-climbing residents to consult, and invited me to the meetings of TYAGG – 4^th Monday of the month, 2:00 p.m. in the Cascade Room. She also urged me to join the Rogue Valley Genealogical Society (RVGS). [3405 S Pacific Hwy, Medford, OR 97501; 541-512-2340; https://rvgslibrary.org]

Relevant Digression:  The RVGS sets aside time once a month for TYAGG to visit with their genealogists. RVGS membership is a Good Deal for individuals if you are going to pursue the hobby actively.  Membership is not particularly costly, and it carries with it access to a library of national as well as local information, one-on-one tutorials, lectures, and access to most of the online genealogy programs – including some that have pretty high charges for private memberships. Rita has accompanied me there twice – for a tutorial and a tour, and then for a lecture/demo on website use.

About the RVM aborists, or arboreals.  Because of Monday conflicts I’ve only been able to attend one meeting, but I learned quite a bit.  Including the taxonomy of genealogists: there are the deep time types who want to push further and further back in their lineages,  and there are the lets-get-acquainted folks more interested in fleshing out details about recent antecedents.  In terms of research style, there are the hard-core purists (nothing used without seeing and documenting the original source) and the good-until-disqualified people.

My meeting with the group –  there were 9 people (total membership is about 20), which was a good size for conversation. We traded information on what we were trying to do, how we were going about it, and the problems being encountered (and sometimes solved).  And, of course we talked story about the interesting family members, which leads me to conclude with the following HINT:

If you want to pique the interest of your children, or especially the grandchildren, find a relative who was notorious, scandalous, or just plain peculiar. My daughter got into a discussion with a co-worker about who had the most interesting family.  She appealed for help, and I sent her information on my father’s cousin who had been a soldier of fortune; among other exploits he had flown a fighter for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.  That was good enough to beat out her colleague’s uncle, a former gun-runner for the IRA.

Give it a try – find out what might be nesting in your tree.

As RVM continues to struggle with balancing resident satisfaction with fees, and resident satisfaction with quantity and quality of service, other organizations are struggling with the same challenges.  Sharing ideas and information can help to identify successful measures and avoid mistakes.  The article below addresses some issues that are current at RVM.  It is reprinted from the LeadingAge website (https://leadingage.org/); LeadingAge describes itself as: “LeadingAge is a community of nonprofit aging services providers and other mission-driven organizations serving older adults.”  — RWB

September 25, 2024

By Bob Buddemeier

The opinions and attitudes expressed are those of the author, who has past experience with, but no current responsibility for, READY Team activities.

“Whistling past the graveyard” is an informal idiom that means to act or speak as if one is not afraid or is relaxed when they are actually nervous or afraid… It can also mean to ignore a threat or problem, or to proceed with a task while ignoring an upcoming hazard, hoping for a good outcome.  — Google AI summary response to a definition search.

So who is whistling past the graveyard?  Could be you – Read on.

There is a resident group at RVM known as the READY Team. (Ready stands for Resident Emergency Assistance Designed for You).   It was organized as the Residents Preparedness Group (RPG) five years ago, and has grown into an organization with nearly 90 active members, and a unique role among resident organizations – it is a specific component of RVM emergency and disaster response plans and operations.  Remember that; it’s significant.  To learn more about READY (which I strongly recommend):  Log in to MyRVM, click the Activities & Amenities tab in the main menu, then click on Groups & Activities, and scroll down to click on the READY icon.

READY grew out of concerns about how we would survive, as individuals and as a community, in the event of the inevitable and potentially devastating Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake.  The existence of other potential disasters was forcefully demonstrated by the Almeda wildfire in 2020, when RVM called for an evacuation of all residents.

Many lessons were learned from the evacuation experience, and continue to be learned as we look at other possibilities.  Like power outages, with which we are quite familiar – but so far, only with the baby ones of a few hours.  Consider an outage of days, especially in a summer heatwave or the depths of a cold dark winter.  It is precisely that latter possibility that has been warned about by a Bloomberg News article on the increasing likelihood of radical attacks on the power grid in the days around and after the upcoming election.

So what is the organization READY to do, and why, and how?  Try to pay attention, since one uppercase READY won’t be nearly enough when it hits the fan – a whole lot of lowercase ready individuals will be needed too.

On the midnight shift, there may be as few as a dozen employees on campus to look after nearly a thousand residents — and those assigned to the licensed care areas are required, by law and contract, to remain in their assigned facility. Under serious emergency conditions, it will be impossible for staff to meet resident needs, much less their desires.  The READY team – combined with prepared and informed residents — is an auxiliary RVM resource that can fill SOME of the gaps in safety and security provision under extreme conditions.

1.   Even under the best of conditions, when we are fully staffed and all systems are working, there is NO WAY for the RVM administration to reliably communicate promptly and efficiently with more than a fraction of the residents.  When the power is out, the problem is much worse.

The READY team consists of coordinators for each high-rise floor and for cottage neighborhoods.  These in turn are grouped into areas, each with an Area Coordinator.  All coordinators have hand-held radios; local coordinators talk to their Area Coordinator, and the Area Coordinators talk to the Resident Radio Room, which is in direct contact with the RVM Incident Commander — who talks by radio with RVM staff and the County and City emergency agencies.

Coordinators are first on the list to get the One-Call-Now emergency notifications, and know to self-activate if a major problem is obvious (such as an earthquake).  Once the radio network is established, instructions are passed to the coordinators, who then set out on foot to contact all of the people in their neighborhood or floor, and tell them face-to-face what is happening and what to do or expect.  Not only does this greatly improve the chances that everyone will get the message, but it permits the coordinator to make sure that the message is understood, and to assess and report back on problems.

2. Assistance: Once the communication responsibility is met, Coordinators may help other residents if they can safely do so. They are expected to know the residents in their area of responsibility, including abilities and disabilities that might be important in an emergency.  At a minimum, directing reports of needs or problems to RVM or other volunteers is expected, but many forms of direct assistance are possible. These range from advice and reassurance to opening garage doors without power, helping put pets in their crates, or, in the high-rises, assisting residents with getting access to the emergency power outlets in the halls.

Coordinators are not expected to administer first aid unless they are qualified, and choose to do so.  However, in order to provide as much coverage as possible, The READY team has sponsored first aid courses for coordinators and other residents, and has located medical kits with first aid supplies in campus locations readily available to the local coordinators and other qualified providers.

3. Education and information: In a disaster situation, staff and resident volunteers can only alleviate some of the problems; they cannot prevent or solve all of them. Individual welfare will depend substantially on individual preparedness.  One of the READY team’s major activities, other than training its members, is informing and persuading people about the importance of preparedness – of having a basic inventory of supplies (food, water, clothing, meds, household supplies and equipment) that can get them through the period (several days to a week) before rescue and relief activities are well established after a disaster.

Item 3 in the list above is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most challenging parts of the job.  It is easier to stop arterial bleeding than it is to pound common sense into somebody who is too thoughtless or too optimistic to stop whistling and take a good look at the cemetery. It is all too common for volunteers to get a reaction along the lines of “Why should I do all that stuff?  I pay RVM good money to take care of me.”

WRONG!  Your money isn’t nearly good enough to staff and equip a 24/7 emergency response department.  The RVM professionals on staff and your fellow resident volunteers are doing what they can to help everybody make it through very hard times.  But they know that in the worst case, it won’t be nearly enough.  If you don’t want to think about it for yourself, let them do it, and take their advice.

To download a list of contacts and access to information about how to prepare and how to volunteer, Click Here.

And stop that damn whistling!

Organ Recital:  Friday, August 23 at 2 p.m., Dr. Peg Evans will perform in the SOU Music Recital Hall.  Contact Mary Jane Morrison for further information.

Arts and Crafts Fair:  The 2024 Fair will be held on November 6.  Reservations must be submitted by September 30; contact Jill West, 6449, for reservation forms.

RVM Energy Audit:  Representatives of the Energy Trust of Oregon made a presentation to interested residents on the energy audit currently in progress.  Additional information disseminated by the Green Team and RVM administration.