TUNBRIDGE — While Joanne Goodnow worshipped at a Catholic church in South Strafford, she practiced her faith the rest of the week as a volunteer in Tunbridge and up and down the First Branch of the White River.
Consider, for one among her many beneficiaries over the last 30 years of her life, the interdenominational Protestant church a few doors down from her house in downtown Tunbridge.
“She and her husband Dana helped set up the Community Food Shelf in the parish house,” Kay Jorgensen, president of the Tunbridge Church Parish Council, recalled last week. “She supported church fundraising events with contributions of sale and auction goods and also made an annual donation. When the super-senior luncheons were started several years ago, Joanne attended, not as a senior guest, but as a kitchen helper bearing a gelatin salad.”
And that barely skims the surface of her devotion to Goodnow’s wide circle of neighbors before she died on March 26, 2019, at 84.
“She did everything from picking up sticks from the lawn to serving on the board of trustees during the time our renovation took place,” Tunbridge Public Library librarian Jean Wolfe said last week. “She was a volunteer in all respects. She didn’t limit herself to volunteering for just the high-profile things. She was so engaged with people, and so welcoming as a desk-reception person.”
That’s where Chelsea resident Bob Frenier met Goodnow in the mid-1990s, after Goodnow had retired from her administrative job in the Orange County court system. Next thing Frenier knew, he was joining her on the board of the Chelsea Health Center and in service to a variety of other area causes.
“She drew good, good-hearted people to her to accomplish so many things,” said Frenier, a former state representative. “And boy, could she keep track of the money. She was the treasurer of more organizations than you could shake a stick at.”
When Goodnow wasn’t finding and focusing money for projects such as the new building at the health center, the center’s House Calls program for frail area residents and its mobile dental service for area schoolchildren, Frenier added, “she and Dana had more dinners with more people in more meeting halls than maybe anybody in the state.”
Joanne’s knack for service long pre-dated her and Dana’s settling in Tunbridge in 1988. During Dana’s postings as a state trooper and Joanne’s as a county court administrator around Vermont, they lived in Swanton, Wilder, Hartford Village, White River Junction, Derby Line, Mendon and Barre.
In Barre, where their three children grew up, Joanne “rose to some leadership role in whatever she was involved in, whether it was the PTA or the Catholic Daughters,” Kelly Goodnow Goddard recalled. “She was a magnet for people. People wanted to work on her committees. They knew it would be done right and well.
“She was not only a leader but a worker bee.”
So Goodnow’s co-founders, fellow volunteers and clients at Safeline Inc., learned during the nonprofit’s formative years between the early 1980s and its evolution, by 1992, into an agency with paid staff.
During the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2018, with a budget of $235,000, Safeline helped 334 survivors of domestic and sexual abuse with 2,383 services, from advocacy in court cases and referrals to other agencies to answering calls to the hotline providing gas-station cards for clients struggling to afford to drive to appointments.
“Joanne and the women we call our pioneers were the first people working at the court, and had the responsibility to respond to claims of domestic assault,” Safeline board chairwoman and Tunbridge resident Felicia Swayze said. “They were the very first advocates working on behalf of the court. They would go out in the middle of the night, meet with people, provide safety plans.”
The work was an eye-opener for pioneer Joyce Miller, a Tunbridge native who worked with Goodnow at the Orange County courthouse and with Safeline.
“I wasn’t aware of how much need there was,” Miller said. “I didn’t realize there were so many abused people. We’d have a woman come in with two black eyes, and a lot of them were mentally abused, being stalked and threatened. Joanne was such a big help with handling these cases.
“She knew what to do and how to do it.”
Long after her years in the trenches, she also knew how to advocate for the agency among her Tunbridge neighbors.
“We always try to have someone at each Town Meeting in our service area, and Joanne never hesitated to speak for us whenever someone had a question about what we do,” said Judy Szeg, Safeline’s coordinator of education and volunteers. “It’s helpful when it’s someone who’s respected in the community.”
Goodnow earned respect as well as a justice of the peace who often married couples, as a board member of the South Royalton Senior Citizens’ thrift store and as a volunteer with the Tunbridge Central School reading program.
She also supported Dana’s community contributions as a selectman and as a director of the Tunbridge World’s Fair.
Behind those public scenes, her circle of admirers found Goodnow just as tireless.
“One of our sons had a traumatic brain injury, and in the years before we lost him (in 2015, at age 45), Joanne helped us in all kinds of ways,” Jean Wolfe said. “And we weren’t the only people she helped. If she thought she could do something for somebody, she jumped in with both feet.”
Through all their service, before Dana died in 2014, the Goodnows somehow found time, to spend winters at Myrtle Beach, S.C., to go on cruises, to lead tours of Alaska, the Panama Canal and the Caribbean for Milne Travel and to go camping with their children, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
”She got off her 18th cruise on March 3,” her daughter Kelly said. “She took it with my sister Denise and me.”
By the time of that last cruise, Joanne Goodnow had been living for several months in Mooresville, N.C., where Kelly lives with her husband. Goodnow’s neighbors and friends back in Vermont had been mourning her absence from the White River Valley since her move in August 2018.
“She was the gentlest person,” Jean Wolfe said. “She did not have any rough edges. Her very being in the community was a great gift.
“She is not replaceable.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.