Someone You Should Know…

Faith in Action serves approximately 250 care receivers and 90 volunteers in our community, and we would like you to get to know some of them. 

If you have someone, who is either a care receiver or a volunteer with Faith in Action of Marathon County, and you would like us to feature them, please let us know.

Meet Christine…

Christine was born in 1929 and grew up on a farm between Merrill and Wausau.  She attended a one-room school from first through sixth grades, which was a 3-mile round-trip walk every day.  Her family raised cows and sold the milk to Doede Cheese Factory, who would pick the milk cans up daily and send a check at the end of the month based upon weight.  The family delivered four dozen eggs each week to Livingston grocery store, which were usually exchanged for groceries rather than cash.  The store would candle eggs to determine their quality, but said they did not have to candle the eggs from Christine’s family, as they were always good.  There was a large garden with everything you could imagine, including potatoes, corn, peas, tomatoes, radishes, beans, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and spinach.  They watered the garden by carrying pails of water from the pump.  Her father trimmed the grass with a scythe, not a lawnmower.  There were seven apple trees and three plum trees, and her mother did a lot of canning since they had no electricity and therefore no refrigeration.  They smoked their own hogs, churned butter, and made maple syrup.   The family was quite self-sufficient despite the Great Depression.

When Christine was 12, the family moved to Wausau, where she attended Zion Lutheran, Horace Mann, and then Wausau East.  During high school, she worked part-time at Woolworths as a sales clerk, where she learned to make ice cream sundaes.  After graduation, she went to work full-time for the Wausau News Agency as a secretary, where she remained for the next 37 years.  She then worked at the Women’s Community in a similar role for another six years, until she retired in 1991 so that she could travel with her sister, who was seven years older.  She has been to Arizona (four times), Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, and two provinces in Canada.  She hopes to someday make it to California.

Christine attributes her health and longevity to a lot of walking, eating a balanced diet, and taking it easy on sweets; as a child, she and her sister got a candy bar to share once a week.  The only medication she takes is vitamin C to fend off colds.  She continues to live in downtown Wausau in the same house she moved into in 1955.  She now suffers from macular degeneration, but her previous hobbies included voracious reading (from The Bobbsey Twins to Zane Grey’s Westerns), writing poetry, playing the piano, and drawing with pencils.  She is fluent in German and she has an adventurous spirit, riding on both a bicycle and an airplane for the first time in the past year. 

We are happy to have met you, Christine.