Patricia Paulsen knows she’s the kind of volunteer most organizations love to see coming, and the 87-year-old Flossmoor resident has a sense of humor about it.
“One of my major faults is that I find it hard to delegate,” Paulsen said. “Through experience, I’ve discovered that it’s sometimes harder to watch somebody else mess up a job than it is to mess it up yourself.”
Paulsen’s civic, cultural and social service spans her entire adult life, but the only volunteer work that was “always part of my life,” she said, rather than a “conscious decision,” was with First Christian Church in Chicago Heights.
Paulsen recently retired after 67 years as the church organist, a span covering well over half of the church’s 112-year-history.
When the congregation bought a Hammond organ in 1947, Paulsen took lessons so someone would be able to play at Sunday services, she said.
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Paulsen remembers having to leave a very cold church midway through Saturday rehearsals at 16th Street and Vincennes Avenue to warm up with a cup of coffee at the Cozy Corner restaurant across the street from the church, she said.
By the time the church moved in the early 1950s to its present location at 1045 Dixie Highway, Paulsen was the established organist — the only one ever in the church’s history, she said.
Her time as a church musician began even earlier.
“I actually played the piano for my dad’s church when I was a child,” Paulsen said.
As one of the few who had piano lessons when her father, the Rev. Harold Elsam, became pastor of First Christian Church in the 1930s, Paulsen became the church musician out of necessity because the outgoing pastor’s wife had been the church pianist, she said.
Paulsen was happy to take on the job, but she said if the Chicago Heights “mafia” had had its way, she might not have been around to fill the role.
“My father was quite a reformer,” Paulsen said. She said Elsam organized other pastors in the area to help rid the town of some unsavory residents.
“They were going to drive out the gang, and they did,” Paulsen said.
Paulsen said her family had been “in jeopardy” because of her father’s actions, but they breathed a sigh of relief when mafia members temporarily moved to another town. Paulsen said she remembers a police car following her home from school for protection during that time, an embarrassment to a junior high school girl.
“I felt terribly conspicuous,” she said.
Still, the lessons from her father were well-learned, and Paulsen went on to make some reforms of her own.
As an active member of the League of Women Voters of the Homewood-Flossmoor Area, Paulsen became even more civic-minded, she said. After she, her husband Tom and their children Jeffrey and Dale moved to Flossmoor, Paulsen decided to run for village trustee. It was 1973, and she was the village’s first woman candidate, she said.
“That was a very interesting experience because I had to kind of work to establish myself once I got on the board,” Paulsen said. “I got more votes than any man that was running on the ticket that time.”
Paulsen served for 12 years, the early years being the most challenging. Paulsen said she knew she was “breaking new ground” in some fairly tense situations.
“I took my seat and the meeting went on and I would try to say something and I would be interrupted or ignored, and finally I got my dander up and I had to say something and I stood up and (spoke out),” Paulsen said. “I could see that that went over very well with the audience because it was obvious that I was being shunned.”
Nothing stopped Paulsen from continuing to help solve “some social problems,” the driving force behind her volunteer work, she said.
“When I join something, I can’t help being really involved in it and I usually end up running it,” she said.
Her volunteer work includes serving on the boards of Eureka College, Irons Oaks Foundation, Jones Community Center, Park Forest Singers and the Olympia Fields Woman’s Club. She has been clinic chair of the Infant Welfare League and president of Friends of the Flossmoor Library, among other accomplishments.
Among the many awards she has received are the Oak Park-River Forest High School Tradition of Excellence Award, the PADS Joseph C. Sherrill Award for Outstanding Volunteerism, the Chicago Bears Community Quarterback Award and Honorary Life Member of the League of Women Voters — USA.
Paulsen thinks her greatest achievement is her 25 years of volunteer work with South Suburban PADS, a nonprofit shelter for the homeless of which she is a founding member, she said.
“I think my consuming interest for a long time has been the PADS shelter because I was in on that from the beginning and I watched it develop,” Paulsen said.
Paulsen has been the site manager at First Christian Church, one of the first churches to “open its doors” to PADS in 1990, First Christian Church Pastor Denny Whiteside said.
Some of Paulsen’s duties are administrative in nature — recruiting volunteers, setting up cook teams for the Monday night evening meal and coordinating the church’s breakfast and lunch meals for PADS guests — but Paulsen has taken on the menial tasks as well.
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“I wash the dirty socks,” Paulsen said. “Now that’s a labor of love.”
She plans to continue for as long as she is able.
“I wouldn’t change anything,” Paulsen said. “It’s fulfilling; it’s interesting; it’s challenging. I met wonderful people and made some wonderful friends. I wouldn’t change it.”
Ginger Brashinger is a freelance reporter.