Better and better, bit by bit

We crossed paths this week with a friend we met in 2010 during our worst day covering some very trying times at Wasilla Senior Center Inc.

Lois Weir was among those who came to our reporter’s aid that day, and she also was part of a group called Elder Watch that was formed when seniors felt conditions at the center had deteriorated to the point where they no other recourse.

We were pleased to be invited back to WASI this week by some of that same group of seniors who’d ask for our help telling their story.

On an informal tour Wednesday with new Executive Director Ingrid Ling we noticed open doors, smiling faces and a vibrant and busy Club 50.

That’s where we found Weir, at her desk in the office of the development and activities director that is tucked inside Club 50. Weir’s here Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but as a full-time volunteer.

We didn’t have to ask her why; Weir offered. She said her senior pals formed Elder Watch to make things better.

“Things are better now,” Weir said. “‘So I thought, why don’t I keep working to make them a little bit better?’”

That’s the grassroots, can-do, pioneer spirit that built the United States, and Alaska.

Newcomb remembered

The Mat-Su Valley lost one of its pioneers Monday when former two-time Wasilla mayor Harold Sherwood Newcomb, 83, died. He was good man who spent his life building our community.

Newcomb’s life of adventure began when he ran away from home in Georgia at the age of 14. Eventually, he joined the U.S. Army and it was the military that brought him to Alaska in 1948.

He moved from Fort Richardson to the Wasilla area in 1952, where he met and married Colony kid Patricia Carson. The two have four children, nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

“When I got off the train in Whittier, I told my Army buddies this was where I was going to live for the rest of my life,” Newcomb said in a July 2011 Frontiersman interview.

Newcomb’s legacy includes serving on the steering committee to create the Matanuska-Susitna Borough in the early 1960s and serving on the first borough assembly in 1964.

He also owned and operated an assortment of businesses, helped to found the Christmas Friendship Dinner and donated what would become Newcomb Park at the corner of the Parks Highway and Crusey Street in Wasilla. It is a solemn privilege to walk in Newcomb’s footsteps — and those of our other local pioneers — and continue to build on the legacy of optimism and commitment to community he left for us all to share.

In lieu of flowers, we suggest civic-minded acts that require us each to invest our own time and sweat making this glorious place we love better and better, bit by bit.