🔒At 99, two Marys leave volunteerism legacy at Johnson Memorial

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They're both named Mary.

They were born 16 days apart to very large families. They're the longest serving volunteers at Johnson Memorial Hospital in Stafford Springs, one in terms of years served (40) and the other in terms of hours clocked (countless).

And each one is 99 years old.

Mary Guglielmo of Stafford works Mondays and Thursdays in the emergency room doing small favors for the patients such as getting them water or an extra blanket, things they're afraid to request from the hospital staff. Mary Alsing of Somers works Tuesdays and Wednesdays, distributing juice to patients from a cart in the mornings and doing filing for the dietary department in the afternoons.

They each find that most of the patients they come in contact with simply want someone to talk to them and relieve the loneliness and fear that comes with being in a medical facility, and they are only too happy to fill that void.

The odds against any hospital, let alone a small suburban one like Johnson Memorial, having two such volunteers are astronomical.

Mary Guglielmo was the seventh of 10 children born in New York's Hell's Kitchen. Her father, Frank, had a business selling ice from a horse-drawn wagon. He came to Stamford one day to help another man move there from New York and he immediately gave up the ice business and bought a house there.

“The ice business was beginning to go anyway,” she said. “Refrigerators were coming in.”

In 1938, she married Frank Guglielmo, a mailman, a marriage that ended with her husband's passing 35 years later and yielded two sons, Republican State Sen. Anthony “Tony” Guglielmo and his brother, Frank, who lives in Maryland.

“My son moved up here in 1982. He didn't want me left alone in Stamford, so he asked me to join him,” she said. “When I got here, I turned to my daughter-in-law, Doris, and asked 'Now what am I going to do?', and she said, 'Go to the hospital and volunteer.' So that's what I did.”

Mary Alsing's road to Johnson Memorial was more tortuous. She was the seventh of eight children born to Clarissa and Milton Otto Bettger, in the town of Monkton in Ontario. Bettger, a man with a sense of humor, owned a variety of businesses, including a car dealership, a hardware store and a fuel business.

She recalls how families in Monkton went without food or heat during the Great Depression. Her father, she said, forgave many an unpaid fuel bill because he knew that the families who owed him money had none.

“People think the recession a few years ago was bad,” she said. “That was nothing compared to the original Depression. We survived because we had a large garden. ”

Mary Alsing had two major heartbreaks in her life. The first was dropping out of nursing school at 19 after she was severely scolded by the school administrator for contracting tonsillitis.

“The only thing I ever wanted to be and never stopped wanting to be was a nurse,” she said. “I should have gone to the board, but I was too timid to do anything about it in those days.”

Her second and biggest heartbreak was the death of her first husband, Pete Halfnight, from illness, a year after their daughter, Susan, was born. Although she had never before earned a living, Alsing survived by renting one of her rooms to a high school teacher, who babysat Susan at night, while she attended secretarial school.

“Times were hard, but we made it,” she said.

In 1959, during a short visit to Hartford, she entered an old school building, never realizing that it was the headquarters of the Hartford Board of Education, and met an assistant superintendent, who, days later sent a letter to Canada offering her a job as a secretary.

“I broke all records for getting a visa,” she said.

She waited until her daughter graduated college in 1964 to marry Carl Alsing, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Hartford, whom she met through mutual friends. They moved from Hartford to Somers in 1966 and, one day, while they were cross-country skiing, a friend suggested that she and Carl volunteer at Johnson Memorial Hospital.

“And that's how we got started,” she said. “It's not the same as being a nurse, but it's in the same field, and that was important to me.” Carl passed on in 2004.

Patricia Lake, who supervised the two Marys for 19 years as the hospital's director of volunteer services, says she also devoted a lot of time to analyzing them as role models for successful aging. Here's what she found:

“It's a combination of factors. They're both very hardworking, very compassionate and very humble. They have a deep sense of faith. They appreciate what they have every day. They don't take the patients and their families for granted. They're active. They put others before themselves. The always look at the bright side of life and they always see the good in people and the things they do,” Lake said.

“They also don't see themselves as being 99,” she added.