The Good Hand people

David Renzi

Monday, Nov. 25, 1996 | 5:18 a.m.

Don Fette has lost his feet. Good thing Art Vuolo is around to lend a hand.

The Boulder City men are two of the components that comprise the volunteer program Lend A Hand: those in need and those who help.

"Lend A Hand does a lot of things for me," says Fette, ticking off the litany of items. "Whenever I need help, I call and they're always there."

The list includes grocery shopping, doing his laundry and taking him to doctor appointments.

"I'd be in a world of trouble without it," says Fette, sitting in a wheelchair in his apartment. "I consider it a blessing. I don't want to make 'em sound angelic or anything like that, but they're always there when I need something.

"I guess if I had family here I wouldn't need Lend A Hand. I guess they're almost like a mom and dad to me."

Vuolo, 76, is a retired corporate pilot who likes to help.

"I had some free time and I couldn't think of a better place to put it," he says. "I get as much out of it as the client."

One of his assignments earlier this week was driving Fette, a diabetic, to the store. Mind you, driving to the store entails more than that simple act. Vuolo must also wheel him out to the car and pack the chair in the trunk.

Then it's off to Vons for lunch meat, bread and cream cheese. Fette would have a much longer list for another Lend A Hand volunteer the next day.

As Vuolo wheeled him from stop to stop in the store, Fette, a shopping basket on his lap, discussed the diabetes he lost his feet to. Now 49, he was diagnosed with the disease when he was about 4 years old.

"I started losing toes back in 1981," he says. "In '92, I lost the feet."

Not that he missed them. "I didn't have the toes anyway."

It is when the inflammation and accompanying sores flare that Fette (pronounced Feh-t) needs Lend A Hand the most. Otherwise he's remarkably self-sufficient. He tools around Boulder City on a mo-ped and can walk well on prosthetic legs.

"You ask Art," says Fette, demonstrating his prowess. "I can keep up with him."

It is that determination to walk that often results in inflamed tissue, which he attributes to excessive pounding on his stumps, ill-fitting prosthetics and a shoddy amputation job.

That said, Vuolo says he rarely hears Fette complain or sees him depressed.

"He's not one to sit back and moan about his fate. He's taken the cards the way they were dealt."

Lend A Hand President Ed Andrews says that holds true for the overall clientele.

"The attitude of most of our clients is absolutely unbelievable," he says. "Don is a typical example. It's rare that you take someone somewhere and they complain."

"And they have all the right in the world to complain, and they don't," says social worker Darla Cady, the program's volunteer coordinator.

"But oh, do they want to talk," adds Andrews, a former volunteer. "Many live by themselves and they're lonely. They'll talk your ear off and all you have to do is sit there and say, 'Uh-huh.'"

Beginnings

Margaret Lotspeich and Patricia Duncombe co-founded Lend A Hand in 1989, although Lotspeich gives the lion's share of the credit to Duncombe.

"The brainstorm was Pat's," says Lotspeich, Lend A Hand program director. "She was a social worker for a home health agency and found situations where respite care was needed -- where the caregiver was not able to go to the store for groceries because his mother had Alzheimer's and would walk off."

Lotspeich and Duncombe, who is no longer involved with the program, started the process in 1988. Lend A Hand was initially under the auspices of St. Christopher's Episcopal Church in Boulder City and served its needy parishioners. It eventually broadened its scope to include the entire community.

A similar program, Helping Hands of Henderson, began in March 1995. It operates out of the Home Health program at St. Rose Dominican Hospital.

Although the elderly comprise the bulk of Lend A Hand's clientele, the disabled and chronically ill are also aided.

"Basically anyone who has a need we can provide for," says Cady, adding that Lend A Hand can provide just about any service but home health care -- "we're not licensed" -- and full housekeeping.

That hardly seems to matter. The client list numbers 226, compared to 85 active volunteers, and is growing.

"We've served over 650 people over the seven-year period," Lotspeich says. "In fact, we've been having anywhere from six to eight new clients a month."

"We need volunteers," Andrews says. "We are signing up clients faster than we can train volunteers."

He means faster than Shirley Putz can train them. A registered nurse and St. Christopher's church deacon, she has been training volunteers from the beginning. And Wayne Putz, her husband, has been volunteering as long.

Asked to define the satisfaction he receives from volunteering, Putz puts it this way: "It's just a benefit of helping people that really need it. And most all our clients are extremely appreciative that they've got somebody they can call."

And when Lend A Hand calls him, Putz almost always responds. In the last fiscal year, the former electrician topped all volunteers with 3,410 miles driven. Betty Young put in the most hours (426).

Among her clients is Katherine Carroll, who hitches a ride to the beauty salon with Young once a week. Other volunteers take her husband, Evert, to the doctor.

"We couldn't exist without Lend A Hand," he says.

Happy at home

Cady says the premise behind Lend A Hand is to help a client maintain or increase his quality of life by enabling him to stay at home instead of in a care facility. Sometimes all it takes is writing out checks for a sight-impaired client.

Services range from the conventional (paying bills) to the unconventional (taking a homebound elderly couple on a morning McDonald's run four days a week).

"It helps 'em stay in the home longer if someone can take 'em places," says volunteer Geneva Stephens, who has lent her services to the program for five years.

Volunteers do only what they feel comfortable doing. Some don't want to leave Boulder City, others will drive a client to Las Vegas and back. Some want to work only with women, some only with men.

"We make it flexible for volunteers, which is why it works so well," Cady says.

Likewise, customers can choose their volunteers.

Take, for example, the case of the walking man. His wife solicited a Lend A Hand volunteer to go on a daily walk with him. The idea was to tire him out so he would sleep through the night. If he wasn't sufficiently tired, he would wake up and attempt to get to Ohio.

"He was always headed back," Putz says.

"A couple of times he made it to the gas station on the corner and tried to bum a ride," Cady says. "If someone had, he would have gone."

Anyway, the woman wanted only a male volunteer to accompany her Alzheimer's-stricken husband on his daily walk.

"His wife wouldn't let any woman walk with him, because people might gossip," Lotspeich says.

After a while, Cady says, client and volunteer become like family.

"I fall in love with 'em," says Stephens, adding that she still maintains contact with former clients who have moved.

Says Andrews: "I guess you would have to get involved to realize the gratification and appreciation that you get from your contact with the clients. You see it in their eyes, you hear in their voice, you read it in their letters.

"That's our reward. It's sort of a down payment on the future. Many of us are at an age where we're gonna be needing this ourselves in a few years."