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Faye Dunkle: A resident steeped in Homeland history

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Resident Faye Dunkle and her smile!

Faye Dunkle’s ties to Homeland Center go deep.

Before she found a home at Homeland, Faye would visit her sister and other relatives here. Her sister-in-law, Dottie Dunkle, served on Homeland’s volunteer Board of Managers and trusted Homeland with the care of her parents, sister and her husband, and even an uncle.

Faye has lived her whole life in Harrisburg and its environs. Her father owned a garage and her mother kept house for the family, including Faye, two brothers, and a sister.

“We had a wonderful family,” she recalls. “We were very close-knit.”

On Sundays, the family might go to a park or visit her mother’s sisters. Attending church was a definite.

“My father used to say Sunday wasn’t Sunday without going to church,” Faye says. For 80 years, she belonged to the same Methodist church in Harrisburg, until it closed.

When she was still in school, the family moved to Paxtang, a small community on the outskirts of Harrisburg. After she graduated from Harrisburg’s John Harris High School in 1941, jobs were hard to find. She was having lunch at a Paxtang restaurant with a friend when the friend’s father – the restaurant’s owner – came in and said that the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau had called. They had a job for Faye’s friend.

“Did you put in an application?” the friend asked. Faye hadn’t, but they were hiring and had offices right there in Paxtang. Faye went the next day and got a job that began a 42-year secretarial and support staff career with the agency.

“I loved it,” she says. “People didn’t leave because it was almost like a family. We were treated well. That’s why nobody left.”

Outside of work, Faye enjoyed dances, going out to eat, and traveling with friends from Maine to Florida.

When part of the Farm Bureau merged into the newly created Agway cooperative in the mid-1960s, Faye could have moved to Syracuse, but she chose to stay home.

“They had a lot of snow up there,” she said. “I didn’t care to move because I had relatives here. I had all these friends here.”

Faye’s father was 60 when he died, and Faye stayed home to help her mother. Faye’s mother showed her spunk, looking for work so she could manage financially. She ended up getting a job with a local funeral home, helping at the home and with the funeral director’s children while their parents worked.

In 2010, Faye came to live in a bright, comfortable Homeland personal care suite overlooking the solarium, but she remembers the previous decades when Homeland was very different, before construction of the skilled care and Ellenberger dementia units.

Her sister lived in skilled care exactly one room above the room where Faye lives now. Faye’s room is decorated in pleasantly seasonal fashion, with fall flowers and pumpkin figurines amid the family photos and a copy of the New Testament. Faye’s niece regularly visits, helping choose her stylish outfits for the week.

Faye always knew that Homeland would suit her.

“Everything is so nice and clean,” she says. “The people are friendly. You couldn’t find a better place.”

Homeland resident Bob Hostetter: “You have to want to make a difference”

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Bob HostetterBob Hostetter loves history. He also loves iron-willed people who fight for change. His two loves converge at Homeland Center, founded in 1867 by a group of Harrisburg women determined to provide a home for widows and orphans left destitute after the Civil War.

“They built Homeland as a place to live, a place to go when you needed some help, and that is really the overarching concept today,” he says. “It’s an amazing phenomenon.”

Bob lives in Homeland while rehabbing from a leg injury. He brings to Homeland a lifetime of service to Harrisburg arts, education, and racial justice.

As a schoolboy in Pittsburgh, Bob loved art classes, making mobiles in the style of Alexander Calder. His father was the executive secretary for an association of printers and papermakers. His mother “was an old-fashioned housewife. She baked pies. The apple pie was great. She would back gorgeous cakes.”

The dinner-table conversation often centered on civil rights.

“I was raised by parents who were actively committed to anti-racist dynamics,” he says. “They brought us up about ways to be sensitive towards racism.”

After studying at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, he moved to the Harrisburg area and served as pastor for a suburban Presbyterian church. But it was the turbulent 1960s, and he felt drawn to serve a church in inner-city Harrisburg.

He and his African American congregants were “active in confronting public officials” over politics and policies. One contingent of older women marched to City Hall, demanding improvements in education and health care. He still marvels at the impact and organizational skills of women who were descended from slaves and who were denied many opportunities in life.

His determined congregants taught him that “you have to have a dream, and you have to have a reason to be, and you have to want to make a difference. That’s what drove those women every day. They never faltered.”

A friend of Bob’s – a pastor equally dedicated to community change – was an official at WITF, Harrisburg’s public broadcasting service. Bob joined him and worked there for 19 years, mainly in community project development, rising to the position of vice president.

Most memorable was the PBS Time to Act campaign, when public television stations nationwide made local productions targeting anti-substance abuse messages to teens. In Pittsburgh, Bob met First Lady Nancy Reagan, then leading her “Just Say No” campaign.

Working for social change also included decades of service with the Rotary Club of Harrisburg, including a year-long term as president. He spearheaded an initiative introducing middle school students to real-world business skills.

“It was a group of people and businesses dedicated to the community who have no other reason to be in Rotary other than to be of service,” he says. “I love the people and still do.”

Bob and his former wife, Martha, raised two children, supporting their son’s love of soccer and daughter’s love of music. His own, lifelong passion for art led him to help create the Allied Arts Fund, a former regional arts facilitator.

For many years, Bob has lived along Harrisburg’s Susquehanna riverfront – first, in the historic Shipoke neighborhood, and then in the equally historic Riverview Manor. From his sixth-floor apartment, he can “see right up the river, where the views are just striking.”

“You can stand in the living room and see a storm coming,” he says. “It’s a magnificent jewel we live with.”

Bob believes that Homeland’s commitment to delivering excellent care sustains support from the region’s generous donors. Their backing directly benefits residents through Homeland’s cheery spaces, diverse activities, and the benevolent fund that assures no resident is ever displaced due to depletion of resources.

“Those women who started Homeland would be stunned to know and see what their efforts have grown into,” he says. “The day-to-day life here is so positive. People are friendly. You pass someone in the hall, and whether you know them or not, they say hello. Anyone who has the need for help like I do would be a fortunate person to come here.”

Homeland resident Gloria Mineur blazes her own path

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Gloria Mineur

Resident Gloria Mineur enjoying her corner suite and life at Homeland.

Gloria Mineur points to a slant-top desk in her room which her father built the year she was born.

“I’m 96, so that desk is 96 years old,” she says.

Gloria enjoys life from her Homeland personal care suite, in a bright corner room where windows overlook trees. She has lived an eventful life — even quietly rebellious.

After volunteering at Homeland for 17 years, Gloria arrived here to live in 2018. She loves her private corner and the chance to engage with staff, mingle with residents, and read to her heart’s content.

“I have a nice room,” she says. “I have my own furniture. I have my computer. I have my printer. The staff is very nice. They’re relaxed. They like the residents.”

Gloria was born in Long Island, New York. Her father served as a New York City firefighter, joining the department in the days of horse-drawn pumpers. In one burning home, he fell from the second floor into the basement.

“If I didn’t see my father for a couple of days, I figured he was in the hospital because he was injured so much,” she says now.

Gloria’s spirited mother immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland at age 15. On the journey, she decided that she didn’t like her birth name, Hannah, so she named herself Teddy, after President Teddy Roosevelt. When someone said Teddy was short for Theodora, she said, “It is? Okay, it’s Theodora.”

During the Great Depression, many Long Island residents placed their children in Catholic orphanages after losing their jobs as domestic help for Gold Coast millionaires. Theodora talked to her husband, and over the next few years, they took in 32 children. Three at a time, they joined Gloria and her two brothers.

“It was exciting to get somebody new, but it was sad to see the others leave,” she says. Gloria helped care for the ever-changing family, learning to cook at age 12. “With Mother, I was always in the kitchen standing beside her.”

In high school, despite earning honors in English, Gloria was put on a commercial track, with sewing and typing classes. She felt she was in school “under false pretenses.”

“I already knew how to type,” she says. “I made my own clothes. I was bored, so I started playing hooky.”

She would take the “L train” to Prospect Park or Forest Hills, finding spots where she could educate herself and read all day — works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dickens that she bought for 34 cents.

Gloria’s mother, finally learning the truth from a truant officer, didn’t get mad. The family doctor provided a medical exception, and Gloria never returned to school.

Around the time her parents moved to Lancaster, 17-year-old Gloria met a dashing older man who had a Ford convertible and had flown airplanes. They married and had three children, but the marriage fell apart.

Living in Lancaster, Gloria was knocking on a door in response to a help-wanted ad while a special delivery man was knocking at the house next door. The two started chatting. He offered to let her know if he heard of any job openings.

His name was Albert. He was African American, and Gloria was white. This was the 1950s. They married, had two sons, and bought land in the Philadelphia area in a black neighborhood, they appropriately named Rebel Hill.

In time, Gloria came to live in Harrisburg, where she worked as a substance abuse counselor. By then, she was married to a newsman working as a state Capitol correspondent and started volunteering at Homeland.

Making herself comfortable in her chair, Gloria says she loves “just about everything” at Homeland and has plenty to keep her busy.

She remains an avid reader, with a chairside stack of books ranging from a Rita Mae Brown mystery to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” She fills her days with bingo, movie matinees, book club, the “Singing Historian” Roy Justice, and the fresh fruit cart get-together.

“As a matter of fact, I have a whole bowl of fresh fruit here right now,” she says. All those activities come back to one thing: “I like to mingle with people. I enjoy people.”

Homeland resident Patrick Ulmen reflects on a life with the Navy and IBM

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Patrick Ulmen

Patrick Ulmen: resident, grandfather, painter, former Navy and IBMer.

Patrick Ulmen can tell you how to milk a cow or make a thermometer casing. He once operated a submarine engine. He can fix a broken-down car. And he can paint a beautiful seascape.

It’s all a product of a life lived on dairies, in towns, and working with the U.S. Navy and IBM.

Today, Patrick enjoys life as a resident in one of Homeland Center’s personal care suites. His roomy, bright space showcases family photos, the books on military history that Patrick likes to read, and his paintings.

First, about those cows.

Patrick grew up in Watertown, New York. His father was a World War I Navy veteran who made 17 Atlantic crossings on the USS George Washington, a troop transport. On that ship, Patrick’s father taught recuperating soldiers to sew and knit.

As a teenager, Patrick spent his summers working for local farmers. There, he learned to drive and to milk cows. At 6 a.m. every day, he would go to the barn and turn on a radio broadcast that played Khachaturian’s rhythmic “The Sabre Dance” to help workers keep time as they milked.

On a dry day, farm work was nice, he recalls, but “on a wet, rainy day, you were wet through.”

As for those thermometer casings — for many years, Patrick’s mother performed piecework at home for a thermometer company. A truck would deliver long glass tubes that his mother would file into precise lengths. She would then roll the tube over a flame and, at the precise moment, hit a pedal that delivered air from a compressor to make a bubble at the end of the tube. Then the tubes would go back to the factory, to be filled — in those days — with mercury.

In Patrick’s room, a sepia-toned photograph shows his mother in profile, wearing a long string of pearls. While raising six children and making those thermometer casings, she also found time for bowling. She held bowling records for 28 years.

After high school, Patrick followed his father into the U.S. Navy, where he served on a Nautilus submarine prototype during the Korean War. His job was keeping the small sub’s diesel engines running amid the roar and the heat.

“Sometimes, it might be 130 degrees in there,” he says. The submarine was performing “spy stuff,” he recalls, sailing from Groton, Connecticut, to Cuba and Puerto Rico while testing methods for identifying locations of other ships.

After four years of Navy service, Patrick enrolled in Broome County Technical Institute (now SUNY Broome Community College) to study mechanical engineering with an electrical sideline. That was also when he married his wife, Shirley, who had been introduced by a friend.

After working such jobs as printer’s apprentice and cable winder, he landed a job with IBM. He would spend the bulk of his career there – 20 years – as the company moved into the forefront of business computing. He worked his way up the ladder and into management, eager to soak up any learning offered. He spent his time in quality assurance, making sure that products sent from vendors met exacting specifications.

“I got really simpatico with the guys,” he says of the vendors whose work he scrutinized. “I might say, ‘You’ve got a rejection coming.’ They were great people to work with. You make friends with them.”

A tour of the artwork hanging on Patrick’s wall introduces some of the outdoor spots where Patrick has gone fishing, canoeing, or boating with his son, brother, and friends. His works show an expert eye for depth and focal point.

Patrick was always active in his parish and belonged to the Knights of Columbus. He stays close with his two granddaughters. At Homeland, he enjoys making friends and spending his time reading and making ship models.

“It’s a pleasure being here,” he says. “It’s the friendliness of the people. No one’s ever said a cross word here. The staff is always happy to help.’’

Homeland resident John D’Orazio: An active, independent life in personal care

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John D’Orazio

John D’Orazio continuing his pursuit of music.

The songbook on the Roland keyboard in John D’Orazio’s personal care suite at Homeland is open to “Stranger in Paradise.” It’s a testament to John’s lifelong love of music.

“I was never very good at it,” he admits. “I’m a frustrated musician. I tried to teach my son the guitar, and I got to like the guitar, but my fingertips got sore.”

John moved to Homeland in May 2018, for the opportunity to be near his wife of 66 years, Barbara, who came to Homeland in December 2017. He stays active with Homeland’s array of events and the security of personal care, while he has peace of mind knowing that Barbara receives the excellent care that earned Homeland the CMS Five-Star Skilled Nursing Care Facility rating, Medicare’s highest citation.

Homeland Center’s personal care wing offers support and services tailored to help residents pursue active, healthy, independent lives. Comfortable suites include a full bathroom and kitchenette. Mealtimes offer selections from a varied menu. Around-the-clock support assures on-call emergency and medical help, plus assistance with daily needs.

John is a Philadelphia native whose path in life took him deeper into central Pennsylvania. He was a U.S. Air Force trainee stationed in Baltimore when he and a buddy went on a double date. John’s companion for the evening was a blind date – a student nurse named Barbara. She was training in a psychiatric unit.

“I always tell everybody I met her in the insane asylum,” John jokes.

John served four years as a clerk in the Air Force, from 1948 to 1952. When he and Barbara married, they moved to Danville, PA, her family’s hometown. He carved out a career in local industries, testing metals for defects. He utilized x-rays, ultrasonics, magnetic particles, fluorescent penetrants, and magnaflux to discover flaws. For the first 20 years of his career, he scrutinized metals made for fighter jets. For the last 20 years, he tested materials used to make railroad tank cars.

“The tank cars held commodities like chlorine,” he says. “If a tank car ruptured or a weld was no good, you’d have to evacuate a whole town.”

John’s daughter Jane puts it in laymen’s terms. “He was to industry what a radiologist is to humans,” she says.

Barbara had an equally important job – obstetrics nurse for Geisinger health system.

“She helped train doctors that were residents,” John says with evident pride. “She made sure the doctors did it the way it was supposed to be done.”

Even when she wasn’t working, Barbara stayed busy, always crocheting, knitting, sewing, growing herbs, cooking, and – especially – reading. Such authors as Sue Grafton were favorites.

“She would read a book a week,” John says.

The D’Orazios raised three daughters and one son. Life was rich with music, as John played the guitar or accordion or organ, and Barbara enjoyed listening. Friday and Saturday nights centered around a card game called Bonanza, played with family.

“It was a little bit of poker, pinochle, and gin rummy,” says Jane.

After they retired, John consulted, and Barbara kept working, too — but they had a plan. They saved their earnings for travel. Their journeys took them to Ireland, Wales, London, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

In the winter, they would rent a house in Florida, departing “as soon as we got the Christmas tree down.”

John D’Orazio

John D’Orazio showcasing one of several wood models he built.

John loves Homeland for the activities, which seem to him much richer than the offerings he’s seen at other retirement communities. He knows that Barbara is comfortable in Ellenberger, where “the nurses take good care of her.” He joins fellow residents to play poker or study history.

In his bright, comfortable personal care suite, he plays that keyboard and keeps a few of the models he built from wood in years past – a sleek whale in oak and walnut, a dump truck, a sporty roadster.

“They’re nice rooms,” he says. “I like the personal care here. They clean the room, and I get laundry done. The food is good. You can ask for something that’s not on the menu, and they’ll prepare it. Everybody here is friendly, and that’s the main thing. I’ve seen other nursing homes, and this tops them all.”

Father and son Ray and Dann Caldwell share the gift of music with Homeland

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Ray and Dann Caldwell

Two generations of Caldwells – Ray and Dann Caldwell share much at Homeland Center.

Music has been a constant note through the lives of Ray and Dann Caldwell.

Ray is a resident of Homeland Center, and his son, Dann, is Homeland Hospice chaplain with an expanding array of responsibilities overseeing the spiritual wellness of Homeland residents. Father and son love to share their love of music, and each draws strength from Homeland’s nurturing community.

Ray grew up in the historic Northumberland County town of Sunbury, Pennsylvania. His father was a World War I veteran. His musically talented mother would sit at the family’s upright piano and play the old songs that his father loved.

“She would open the piano bench, and there all these songs were,” Ray remembers. “Dad would sit in the background and just love to hear them.”

Ray enjoyed singing in school choirs and playing baritone horn for school bands. That baritone horn emitted “a beautiful sound,” he says. “If I ever recommend a sound to a young person going into a band, the baritone horn is like a voice. It’s a beautiful range.”

After graduating from Susquehanna University with a degree in business administration, Ray came to Harrisburg to live with his mother’s cousin. He joined the Harrisburg Choral Society, lending the group his tenor II-baritone voice.

One day, Ray visited Derry Street United Methodist Church, recommended by a friend. There, he spied a fellow Harrisburg Choral Society singer, one with a clear, beautiful voice whose range spanned alto to soprano. He walked up to Betty Stauffer and said, “I know your face.”

“One thing led to another, and we got married,” Ray says.

Betty’s father cofounded Harrisburg’s Polyclinic Hospital, now part of UPMC Pinnacle. The young family lived in a leafy Harrisburg enclave called Riverside. Dann and his brother, Rick, sledded the hills and streets. The family enjoyed feeding the ducks at Italian Lake Park.

“It was an idyllic little neighborhood,” recalls Dann.

Ray had seen his uncle selling insurance, and it seemed like a needed service. As an insurance salesman, he specialized in helping the elderly “make sound and good decisions,” says Dann. “He had a very strong moral foundation for assisting people in making appropriate and reasonable decisions about insurance needs.”

Adds Ray: “That’s what insurance is all about. You don’t think you need it, and maybe you let it go because something else needs to be done. It’s the idea that you learn to put certain things in order in your life.”

Through it all, music was a constant. Dann and Rick sang in church. Ray and Betty sang in the choir and a gospel quartet. Often, the family sang as a quartet.

Even at Homeland, father and son have sung duets for chapel services. When Betty, a former Homeland resident, died in 2018, Dann found the sole recording of the Caldwell family singing together, with their favorite hymn, “Wayfaring Stranger.” They played it at her funeral, and then the congregation joined in singing a fourth verse, written by Dann.

“Music was my mother’s favorite thing, so it was about the music of heaven drawing one home,” he says.

For 30 years, Dann has pursued his “desire to serve,” earning divinity degrees from Princeton University, and charting a course of ministries with “a foot in the church, and a foot in the community.” Today, in addition to his Homeland work, he pastors Shopes United Methodist Church.

Since joining Homeland Hospice in 2013, Dann says he has met incredible people.

“It is a privilege to serve our patients and residents,’’ he says. “It is a privilege to hear their stories and experience a small portion of their challenges and joys the place where each one is in the midst of their spiritual journeys.”

Dann’s duties include planning programs and inviting speakers. In May, he organized a Holocaust Remembrance Day program that featured Lillian Rappaport, Holocaust educator for the Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg.

“Our programs provide residents with opportunities to think and reflect morally and ethically and spiritually,’’ Dann says.

Dann sees Homeland’s commitment to quality of life reflected in his father’s experience.

“My dad certainly believes he’s well cared for, that people enjoy him, and he can enjoy them and have a good social life,’’ he says. “It’s a privilege for my father to live here, and it’ s a privilege and a blessing for me to serve the Homeland community.”

For his part, Ray appreciates the friendliness of the people.

“Homeland is a godsend,” he says. “Homeland is a beautiful treasure.”