Archive for category: Homeland Center News

Sipping a Coke float delivered by a kind Homeland Center aide, Betty Hungerford shared why life is better in a top-rated continuing care retirement community.

“When you reach a certain age, you’re better off in a place like Homeland than you are at home because you build friendships and relationships and have opportunities you couldn’t have if you lived alone,” she said.

At Homeland Center, Betty is a resident, and she is a treasure. For 20 years, she was Homeland’s development director, raising the funds that propel Homeland’s growth and sustain its stellar reputation for unmatched care.

Betty recently retired at the age of 90! Even as a Homeland resident, she volunteers to serve on the Board of Managers and advises the Board of Directors chair.

A native of Kentucky, Betty was born in a tenant house on her grandfather’s farm. Her father worked in local shoe factories, rising to supervisor, until he moved the family to Palmyra, PA, to work in a plant there.

“He was a learner,” Betty said. “He was a reader. He liked people. He talked as much as I do and lived to 40 days short of 100.”

He was also married to Betty’s mother for better or worse, as he once told a psychiatrist who advised him to get a divorce. Betty’s mom was mentally ill with manic depression and schizophrenia. She was institutionalized for 13 years until new medications helped her manage. Some friends didn’t know about her struggles in her final years.

“That’s her miracle story,” Betty said. “It’s a story I don’t mind sharing because it can give some people hope and understanding about mental illness. It’s a good lesson in never giving up your faith.”

Betty is a proud graduate of Lebanon Valley College, where she majored in economics with minors in political science and English. Music always played a central role in her life, and she sang with the LVC Glee Club.

After graduating in 1954, Betty married and had the family she had always dreamed of – a houseful of three boys and one girl.

“Everybody came to our house,” she said. She laughs about when one son got permission to invite “a few friends” after graduation rehearsal, only to bring the whole class of 125 kids.

Betty’s professional life began in the Pennsylvania Department of Highways (now PennDOT) communications office. She learned to stand up for herself, once telling her boss to stop slamming his door in anger because it disrespected her and the women she supervised.

“He was so shocked, I thought he was going to fall out of his chair,” Betty remembers. “We became long and fast friends.”

It was the beginning of a career devoted to communications and development. She learned fundraising as a March of Dimes volunteer. When she believed in the cause, she didn’t hesitate to ask for money. “If you tell your story and get people to understand how important it is, then it makes them want to give,” she said.

Betty was an independent contractor for Homeland projects. But Morton Specter, the late Homeland board chair, and Homeland President and CEO Barry Ramper II “just wouldn’t give up until I came to work here.” She relented in 2002 and started her remarkable run in an office equipped with a wingback chair and a telephone table.

She built connections to the community and raised funds as Homeland grew. Homeland Center’s 155th Anniversary Celebration Event in 2022 wasn’t meant to honor her, she insists, but she was humbled when organizers and her kids convinced her to let it become a tribute to the “Queen Bee.”

The event raised record amounts for Homeland’s benevolent care fund, ensuring that no resident is ever forced to leave Homeland due to depleted resources. The outpouring of love was “a little overwhelming,” she said, but it served as a testament to her love of people.

No profile of Betty is complete without her love story with Paul Hungerford. They first knew each other through friends, but in those days, she thought he was a snob, and “he thought I was a ditzy blonde.”

Then again, he had a dry sense of humor and “always looked like a million dollars.” In 1974, she joined him in Florida to get married. Until he died in 2010, they played cribbage before dinner, attended concerts and theater, and enjoyed each other’s company.

“We truly adored each other,” Betty said. “Everyone should be so lucky.”

Today, Betty provides fundraising guidance for Homeland Board Chair Carlyn Chulick – “She is marvelous,” said Betty. Betty also serves on the Board of Managers to help maintain Homeland’s homelike feel.

“I’ve never worked with such a dedicated group of volunteers,” Betty said. “Never. They all believe in Homeland and what we do.”

As a Homeland resident, Betty enjoys the activities, including musical performances. She loves reading as much as she did as a child when she hid under the covers with a flashlight and a book. Her room is filled with photos of Paul, her children, and grandchildren. The people of Homeland, she said, “have very kindly taken care of me.”

“I feel very secure and well-cared for,” she said. “I know that if my needs change, they will be met. I feel I’ve been blessed.”

Homeland Center (www.homelandcenter.org) offers levels of care including personal care, memory care, skilled nursing and rehabilitation. Homeland also provides hospice, home care, home health and palliative care services to serve the diverse and changing needs of families throughout central Pennsylvania. For more information or to arrange a tour, please call 717-221-7900.

Mike Conte came to Homeland in April. Since then, he has made friends — “lots of them.”

“They’re really nice here,” he said. “I like the people. I like how the staff caters to you.”

Mike and his wife, Betty, share a bright, corner-room personal care suite. His roots are deep in Harrisburg, where he was born and raised.

Mike’s parents were immigrants from Italy. In the 1920s, his father bought a bar and restaurant at 4th and Kelker streets in Harrisburg. Even though it was named the Keystone Restaurant, everyone knew it as Tony’s, after Mike’s dad. The owner of the business next door, Lappley’s Shoe Store, was a good friend of Tony’s who was also treasurer of Camp Curtin Bank.

“That’s where my dad got all his loans,” Mike recalls. “Everything was done on a handshake.”

Mike’s parents ran the restaurant, and Mike and his older sisters, Rose and Evelyn, helped by washing dishes or cleaning the kitchen. His father was constantly smoking a cigar. If he put it down to conduct business, he would tell the kids, “First one to find my cigar gets a quarter.”

At home, life revolved around the neighborhood firehouse, now the Pennsylvania National Fire Museum.

“We used to know the firemen,” he said. “The police would stop there. It was like old home week. There was a baseball field where we’d play baseball all summer or go to City Island to swim in the river. I was glad I was born in that time because they were the good old days.”

After graduating from William Penn High School in 1951, Mike worked for a building contractor and then at the family restaurant until he was drafted. He spent two years in the Army, including a stretch in peacetime Korea.

“I was a cook, but they wouldn’t let me cook,” he said. “You had to work your way up to that. That’s when you were peeling potatoes by hand, 15 or 20 bags at a time.”

Not long after Mike came home, his father died, and Mike and his mother ran the restaurant. In 1957, he went to work in the furniture service center of Pomeroy’s department store, loading and unloading trucks and helping with deliveries. He worked there the rest of his career, totaling 39 years with Pomeroy’s and its successor, Bon-Ton. The work could be challenging, but Mike enjoyed the company of his coworkers and brought his sense of humor to the job.

Mike and Betty first met before he entered the service when mutual friends were getting married.

“Every Saturday night, we’d get dressed up to the nines and go to the movies,” Mike said. They’d catch two movies at different Harrisburg cinemas, enjoying Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in the golden age of Hollywood musicals.

When he returned from the service, they lost track of each other. In 1962, Mike married a woman he met on a visit with his sister, but only six years later, she died from cancer. Suddenly, Mike was a single dad to their daughter.

“Thank God my mom was still around,” Mike said. “We made her the official babysitter. ‘That’s okay with me,’ she would say.”

About seven months later, he and Betty reconnected.

“We’ve been married now 51 years,” he said.

Mike and Betty enjoyed traveling on bus trips through the United States, often in the South and New England. He has a collection of postcards from Harrisburg’s past, including all 16 firehouses, and he still loves watching old movies, especially gangster films. James Cagney and George Raft are favorites.

Now at Homeland, he keeps busy, especially enjoying the various musical activities and bingo.

Mike makes a point of not taking things too seriously.

“I make a joke out of everything,” he said. “You can’t go around being mopey all the time.”

Homeland Center (www.homelandcenter.org) offers levels of care including personal care, memory care, skilled nursing and rehabilitation. Homeland also provides hospice, home care, home health and palliative care services to serve the diverse and changing needs of families throughout central Pennsylvania. For more information or to arrange a tour, please call 717-221-7900.