Member & Volunteer: The Sweetness of Bonding

After swimming laps for 25 years, Rita Mertens, at 91, knew she wasn’t done with water workouts. But having given up the long pool and – about the same time – most of her driving privileges, she was confronted with a dilemma: How was she going to get from her home overlooking the rolling hills and vineyard-covered valleys of rural San Luis Obispo to therapeutic aquatics downtown?

She found her answer in a membership in SLO Village and in a star-volunteer driver named Doug Seaborne. Twice a week, Doug helps Rita commute to the water. In the process, a warm relationship has developed between member and volunteer. Theirs is but one example of the bonding that emerges out of the SLO Village experience.

“I really like her,” Doug said. “She’s really sharp and has a good sense of humor.” They have books in common and talk about books on their trips back and forth. “What are you reading,” is a regular question. They have even traded favorite books, hoping to strike a mutual interest.

Rita has learned that Doug is a hiker who sometimes goes off on overnight adventures. “He has all the gear,” she said. A widow after 53 years of marriage to “Bud,” Rita regaled Doug with stories of the couple’s frequent visits to the White House because they had a friend who worked in the West Wing. She has been on several tours and has seen the situation room, Doug said.

Rita has even met Doug’s wife, Marianne, who owns a retail clothing shop in downtown San Luis Obispo - Maison Marianne,970 Chorro St, 805-548-1880.Douggrew up in the San Gabriel area of Los Angeles, graduated from Cal Poly in the late seventies, and worked in the Bay Area, Ventura, Thousand Oaks and Camarillo. “We always came here (San Luis Obispo) to get away,” he said. It was an easy choice to settle here in retirement.

Working in clinical research and conducting human trials for quality assurance with Amgen, he retired in 2020. Rita, too, is a native of Los Angeles. Born in 1931 during the height of the Great Depression, she grew up and went to school there through her second year of college. Instead of finishing, she embarked with two friends on an odyssey of Europe in 1953.“Upon return, being a ‘good girl’ of the Fifties with little ambition, I managed to grab myself a wonderful husband,” she said.”

Her husband worked in the television industry, so they were transferred from city to city, from Los Angeles to Cleveland to Chicago to New York City and Stamford, Conn. She retains an affection for the East Coast. She recalls going to television promotion dinners and sitting alongside the CBS anchor at the time, Dan Rather, and, on other occasions, with celebrities such as the cast of the long-running series “Mash.” During these times, five children “joined the moving road show.” “They were chaotic years, but I loved them all because I was exposed to people and places I never otherwise would have experienced,” she said.

With the children grown and gone, Rita and Bud chose an early retirement in San Luis Obispo. She plunged into social engagements and travel abroad. But on no schedule.“ I felt that I was going off into the weeds for lack of a daily structure,” she explained. “SoI kept raising my hand to volunteer for community causes,” she said. “I was never altruistic, but that slippery slope took me to six years as a hospice volunteer, four years with CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), two years at the old homeless shelter on Prado Road, 14 years at St. Vincent de Paul, the charitable arm of Old Mission Church, and 25 years as a state ombudsman monitoring skilled nursing facilities on a weekly basis to protect elderly patients.”

But on her 90th birthday last year, acceding to family urging that she slow down, she shed all those activities that had provided her structure and agreed to give up 99 percent of her driving. “But soon SLO Village came to my rescue.” Rita said. “In the past year, in addition to the physical services you have provided me, I have enjoyed the shared stimulating conversations that arise out of the commutes, the coffee hours and the lunches.”

As for Doug Seaborne, he usually signs up for three assignments each week. Early this year, he took the orientation and has been busy ever since. Ninety percent of his work is transportation and gardening. He has a passion for gardening, and he volunteers alongside three master gardeners at the San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden. “They have such a wealth of knowledge,” he said. And besides, he gets to take home cuttings for his fully landscaped yard. He is thoroughly in tune with the SLO Village goal of having older adults age in place, in their homes surrounded by the familiar. “I like working with older people,” he said. “They appreciate the help, and they are interesting to talk to.”

Rita is no longer swimming laps for 45 minutes at 7 a.m. every day. But on her way to her aquatics workouts, she has discovered drivers such as Doug who, in her words, “are professionals in their fields who still maintain a wide knowledge of the world.”



Member and volunteer: the sweet connection in the SLO Village world.
(Reporter’s thank you: Rita Mertens provided a written narrative that contributed substantially to this story.)