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Celebrating Newburyport as a place where old folk thrive, a new film has wowed Screening Room audiences.
A Force for Good welcomes us to hear a dozen local seniors sketch their arrival–or childhood–here, and what they’ve since done related to civic life. Emphasis is on the city and all that is here to engage retired people with time to give, skills to share, company and conversation to offer.
Newburyport has a lot. In the museums, the schools, the Firehouse, Anna Jacques and elsewhere are opportunities to volunteer. Elderly volunteers in the library’s once-vibrant, now-stagnant Archival Center seem to have found places to remain active after they were “terminated” for no honest reason.
City Hall’s blunders aside, much of what the city offers happens at the Senior Center: arts, crafts, games, talks, workshops, assistance with tax forms and other paperwork, and more. A nice building with a few large rooms open to all kinds of civic events for people of all ages, all of it easily accessible.
Every now and then, a van will pull up to the door, and off go a gaggle of geezers on a field trip. (Hold your heat! I am one, so I can use that word.)
So it’s both predictable and natural that the Senior Center helped make A Force for Good possible, and the center is well-credited when the thank-yous roll.
On the very week the film aired at the Screening Room, a letter from the Senior Center’s Ann Freeman appeared in The Daily News. Like the film’s end-credits, it, too, was a litany of thank-yous to countless people, both individuals and groups, with and for whom she had worked until her position was, to use a euphemism that fools only fools, “not renewed.”
By title and assignment, Freeman was the “Council on Aging Outreach Specialist,” and her job description might be summed up by saying that she offered assistance and encouragement to everyone who went to her, and they were plenty, all of them aged and aging.
By all accounts she was energetic, upbeat, and committed to do all she could for men and women who are often frustrated by the time they seek help and expect nothing more than more frustration. All bear witness to how often she put people at ease and helped them solve problems.
So why the farewell?
Just weeks before A Force for Change played at the Screening Room, Mayor Sean Reardon cut her position from the city’s budget. One might assume that this is a cost savings measure, a cover-all reason impossible to argue with.
Impossible until you add the context of the rest of the budget, specifically the $3.5 million to be poured into the Frog Pond. While some attention to the pond is necessary and expensive, preparation for recreational boating is only one of those two things, and it sure ain’t necessary.
Please try to picture “recreational” boats on a body of water so small. On the Plum Island marsh, recreational boats are what we see cruising the channel. On the Frog Pond? They’d be like golf-carts on a miniature course.
Like the DC reflecting pool fiasco, this is a vanity project. More to the point, if that one line item is any more than 1/60th of the $3.5m package, then it by itself tops the annual salary of an Outreach Specialist.
Ah, no matter. Few people ever look at a city budget. Fewer yet bother with line items. And even less will hear the gaggle of geezers and caregivers at one City Hall meeting who fervently asked to keep Ann Freeman where she was doing so much impossibly good work.
But many see films, and when it’s local with familiar faces on the big screen, most stay for the end credits. Judging by the smiles of viewers as they left the hall, few if any noticed that a film rooted in Newburyport’s Senior Center extended thanks to the very man who “not renewed” the center’s beloved staff member.
Yet another photo-op with a huge font in place of an ever-blissful smile that fools only fools.
Jack Garvey
Newbury resident
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