Mary Wade Feels The Love At Early Valentine’s Day Fest

Cupid alighted early this year at Chatham Place at the Mary Wade Home in Fair Haven — especially for Bill Wood and Barbara Harris. Who says new love doesn’t flourish in the later decades of life? 

The couple got married at the Mary Wade Home last year. On Thursday morning, they marked their first anniversary at a special Valentine’s Day party for the neighborhood-anchoring senior facility’s residents, friends, and staff.

The triumph of love over experience? Perhaps. Wood said it is his fourth marriage, and while he and Harris met at another rehab facility, they tied the knot right here where they were dancing.

“When [one day] she didn’t come down [to the exercise area], I asked to see if she were okay,” Wood recalled during a Thursday morning interview with this reporter. 

“I loved her at first sight,” he said.

Harris demurred: ​“He was playing hard-to-get.”

“Connecting with other people makes you healthier and more joyous,” said Jennifer Heath, president & CEO of United Way of Greater New Haven, which was sponsoring the annual Valentine’s Day party for the third year.

Heath said the idea for the event, for which United Way solicits volunteers to write personalized Valentine’s Day cards for 200 residents of the elderly campus on Clinton Avenue, emerged during the early days of Covid when everyone, especially older people in congregant settings, were feeling isolated.

Thursday’s festive event was the first time United Way’s volunteers were able to present the cards in person and to laugh and dance with residents. 

“It’s not just the valentines, it’s being here,” Heath said, as residents like Rita Monaco in the back of Chatham Place’s spiffy lobby, full of heart balloons and flowers, cut a rug to Jerry Lee Lewis’s ​“Great Balls of Fire.”

“I dance every day of the year,” said Monaco, who has been living at Mary Wade for five years. ​“Every day is a good day to dance.”

Bill Wood, the president of the Chatham Place at Mary Wade residents’ council, appeared to agree. 

After he opened his card, which featured a breakfast theme on the front and inside the words ​“Hope you had bacon today, that you are smiling, and may today be sunny side up,” Wood hit the dance floor. Despite a bad back for which he takes three medications, he did some very respectable gyrations.

North Havener George Creamer grew up in Waldoboro, Maine, but then his dad took the family to North Haven for a job with Pratt & Whitney, and Creamer made his life in North Haven. He worked at Pratt & Whitney himself and at other local factories, became a volunteer fireman, and an accomplished musician who plays his guitar at resident events.

As to Valentine’s Day, Creamer had a thoughtful answer about what he is going to give his girlfriend Gail whom he has been with for eight years. ​“I’m going to give her the gift of me,” he said.

Maria Olmo, the director of residential care at Mary Wade’s (older) Boardman Residence, said that it is not really that unusual for their residents in the later stages of their lives to meet and to fall in love. ​“I tell people [when they move in] that it’s not the end but the beginning of new connections. It’s a family here. They find somebody and fall in love. It’s a beautiful thing.”

With 84 units – 60 assisted-living and 20 ​“memory” units — Chatham Place at Mary Wade opened last year. As opposed to the Boardman Residence, the older building at the southern end of the campus, which is an assisted living facility on the nonprofit model, Chatham Place is for-profit and you have to have some means to move in. 

It is attracting people not only from the area, said its Program Director Jessica Soto, but also from around the country.

Like Wood, for example, who hails from Missouri where, he said, he wasn’t in the habit of sending cards out for Valentine’s Day.

He prefers teddy bears and he gave one to Harris. Of her, he added, ​“This one’s a keeper.”