O’Bryan is an advocate for seniors and Valley government watchdog

MAT-SU — After 30 years of public service, Elsie O’Bryan has the right to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.

The ex-city clerk for the town of Houston, longtime senior citizen advocate and current special education assistant believes that to complain about the state of affairs, one should have his or her hat in the ring. With the wear and tear on her hat, O’Bryan said she is not shy about voicing her unhappiness.

O’Bryan first moved to Alaska in 1977. The trip was originally scheduled as a visit to a friend, but she ended up coming with three trunk-loads of personal belongings and never looked back.

She started to work with the Vista Volunteers, a precursor to the service organization called AmeriCorps. Her first task was to evaluate the need for senior services in the Mat-Su Valley.

“At that time, the Salvation Army had a coffee and doughnut program in the basement of the Dorothy Page Museum,” O’Bryan said. “That was the extent of the senior services in the Valley.”

It was a natural fit for O’Bryan, who said she felt like she was a generation behind because she had older parents. And she took to the work passionately after seeing her grandmother wither away as she aged without the proper services.

“The spark died. I said, ‘This is not the way it should be.’ Obviously, seniors have a whole lot more to contribute than that,” she said.

After completing the assessment in 1979 and raising interest in Houston, Palmer and Wasilla, O’Bryan took a job as the clerk for the city of Houston.

“At that time, the city had 320 people. They had a 1943-model fire truck but no fire station. I saw it as an opportunity to be in on the ground floor to help the community develop,” she said.

Over the next decade, O’Bryan watched as the city built a fire station, a now-derelict septic disposal plant, what at that time was Houston Middle and High School, and the Mid-Valley Senior Center.

O’Bryan said she wrote the grant applications for many of these projects and lobbied for funding. Grant money was easier to get back then, and she said she was very effective at what she calls “politicking.”

“I think the school board finally got the school (in Houston) funded because they were tried of listening to me,” O’Bryan said.

But, never one to take sole credit, O’Bryan said she was one of many who worked on Houston’s behalf.

“One of my pet peeves is anyone involved with government saying. ‘Look at what I did.’ It is a group effort to get everything done,” O’Bryan said.

Even while she was the clerk for Houston, the seniors were never far from O’Bryan’s duties. When Mid-Valley Seniors Inc. formed and needed help to build a housing facility, O’Bryan was happily assigned the duty. The center was eventually built with 10 independent living apartments and a group meeting and dining facility.

Mid-Valley Seniors Inc. acknowledged O’Bryan’s work by offering her a job as executive director when she left Houston in 1992. Under her direction, the senior center continued to grow and be successful. After she left in 2006, the center started to expand despite the hard economic climate for non-profit organizations.

After leaving the senior center, O’Bryan found a job as a special education assistant at Wasilla Middle School. She provides in-class assistance to a group of students with special needs, helping them with reading, math and whatever the teacher needs.

Asked which group was the most difficult to deal with — children, seniors or politicians — O’Bryan paused then said they each have challenges and struggles. It is the job of middle schoolers to be difficult, she said. Seniors have a hard time accepting other points of view, she said, especially when combined with the “tragedies” of Alzheimer’s and other disabilities.

Politicians, on the other hand, can be replaced, O’Bryan said. They are on a cycle, and “if you don’t like the way they do it, you can get involved yourself.”

Never married and with no blood relatives in Alaska, O’Bryan refers to the relations she has made over the years as family. To feed this family, she is the chairwoman of the committee responsible for the Christmas Friendship Dinner. And like so many other projects in the Valley, O’Bryan was involved since the beginning.

The first year she went to the dinner 18 years ago, she worked the greeting table. A few years later, the head chef said the dinner would have to be canceled because of a lack of support. O’Bryan told him the dinner was too important to cancel, so he told O’Bryan to do something about it.

Now, O’Bryan coordinates all the volunteers and planning surrounding the annual event, a duty she refers to as turning the key and walking away. Because of the success of last year’s event and the 1,700 people fed, the planning committee will meet year-round to prepare for the 2010 dinner.

This sort of personal involvement has been O’Bryan’s modus operandi since first coming to Alaska. Over the years and growth she’s seen, her commitment is no less passionate. She said she loves working with her students and will continue on the Christmas Friendship Dinner “until they throw me out.”

As for politicians, expect O’Bryan to be a vocal force for years to come.

Contact Todd L. Disher at todd.disher@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.