They are three very different women with a common thread that has united them and run through their lives to create a colorful tapestry of community and care.
As Kay Keller, Julie Kolinski and Sue Schuelke reflect on decades spent at Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Community Memorial Hospital in Menomonee Falls, they each have an inspiring story to share.
Kay Keller
With volunteer hours that total 13,309, Keller was 26 years old when she started as one of the hospital’s original volunteers–the “Pink Ladies”–in 1963.
Keller responded to a newspaper ad stating that a new hospital being built in the area was looking for volunteers. She met at Stolper Steel (now the Wisconsin Athletic Club) with about 50 other women. “I was very pregnant at the time,” she recalled.
She soon started working at the front desk one night per week, handing out visitor cards and, she added with a laugh, “dealing with patients’ family members arguing with me over the limited visiting hours we had at the time.”
Still, from day one Keller had nothing but love for her position.
“(When I first started) it was the only time I got to talk to adults!” she said, adding that she has made friends she will keep “forever.”
Five decades later, Keller is still at the front desk by the Main Door, and she has been the gift shop chairman for the past several years.
“It’s a wonderful place to volunteer because you make so many people happy–we’re not the ones poking them with needles!” she said. “You see life from the beginning to the end. I walk away thinking, ‘I should be paying them.’”
As for the role of CMH in the area, Keller says it is invaluable.
“I grew up in Chicago so to be in a small town with a hospital 10 minutes away, I feel so lucky,” she said. “There is such wonderful care here.”
A Menomonee Falls resident for 42 years, the mother of three and grandmother of seven now lives in West Bend with her husband, Charlie, and she continues to breathe life into what will be one of her main legacies.
With her husband and kids helping at hospital fundraiser Cheery Cherry Fall Fair throughout the years, a message of giving back has always resonated throughout the Keller family.
“There have been lots of opportunities for them to give back,” Keller said of her children. “If your children see you volunteering, they will embrace it themselves.”
Julie Kolinski
Joining the CMH family as a “Pink Lady,” Kolinski has spent the last 46 years donating her time. Her volunteer hours stand at 10,451. “It’s been a wonderful experience.” she said. “I can’t say I have ever had a bad day.”
Kolinski started volunteering a few years after the hospital opened its doors. Because her husband, Ed, traveled for his job, the mother of three (now also a grandmother of three) was looking for an outlet.
“I had a dear friend who was a volunteer and she told me, ‘You have to get out of the house,’” Kolinski said.
She started coming in one night per week during the 6 to 8 p.m. visiting hours.
“They all came in the revolving doors,” she said.
Volunteering has been one of the greatest highlights of Kolinski’s life, she emphasized.
“I can’t say enough about it,” she said. “I never worked with a bad volunteer and I mean that. We’re here because we want to be, not because we have to be.”
Kolinski’s husband has lent a helping hand, too, volunteering for hospital fundraiser Wheeling for Healing and being the Santa to his wife’s Mrs. Claus for employees’ children at holiday parties.
“It’s just been a wonderful relationship,” she said of her involvement with CMH. “I remember one of my neighbors saying, ‘You’re crazy giving away those hours,’ but the feeling I have when I am here and go home, wow. I know that I helped someone in a small way and I thank God that I can still do it.”
Kolinski said that CMH has been a blessing in her life in more ways than one as her own family benefited from the neighborhood facility many times.
As luck would have it, her son broke his arm one day before the hospital opened.
“I had to drive to the nearest clinic with screaming kids,” she said.
“It would have been nice to have a hospital nearby, and we certainly used it many times after that.”
Kolinski said she is most proud of the facility’s “innovative health care” and the free on-site Community Outreach Clinic.
“(At the clinic) we provide health care to the uninsured and underinsured,” she said. “Even the products from (the hospital’s) garden goes to those patients.”
As she looks back on thousands of hours at CMH, Kolinski said she values the lessons she has learned and the relationships she formed and still maintains.
“It’s been a wonderful experience.” she said. “I can’t say I have ever had a bad day.”
Sue Schuelke
Schuelke, now an RN and director of Volunteer Services, began her tenure at CMH 44 years ago as a candy striper on the medical floor.
“I took it as a summer job,” she explained.
The Colgate resident–partner to Mike, mother to three sons and grandmother to five grandchildren–has been with CMH since 1970.
Clad in a white blouse and red-and-white-striped pinafore, a thenteenaged Schuelke took on the duties of passing out water to patients and changing linens.
At the end of her first summer with the hospital, the staff education department put together a training program so that the candy stripers could become nurse’s aids and Schuelke followed that path. Her father was her inspiration, she said.
“My dad was in the Army and he was wounded in World War II, and the nursing care he received made such an impression on him,” Schuelke said. “That’s what led me into this career.”
She went from being a nurse’s aid to attending nursing school, first at UW-Eau Claire, then transferring to the Milwaukee County General Hospital School of Nursing (now known as Froedtert).
Schuelke worked clinical units as a medical-surgical nurse until 1996 when she transitioned to Care Connection (call center) until 2010 when she became Director of Volunteer Services which helps with the recruitment and management of more than 300 volunteers. “We also do fund-raising and service projects,” she said. Several things come to mind when Schuelke recounts her decades with the community hospital.
“There are a couple memories that stand out,” she said. “To my knowledge, we took care of one of the very first AIDS patients here (who stayed at the hospital from the time of diagnosis until he passed away) and that was a very eye-opening experience for all of nursing.”
From beginning as a volunteer to overseeing the volunteers, Schuelke has come full circle.
“My experience as a volunteer has helped me to care for people and has helped my interactions with people,” she said. “I am glad to be a part of the 50-year anniversary. Fifty years is worth celebrating, especially because this hospital has been such an important part of the community.”
By Nikki Ackerman,
Family Matter.