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Question: How did you navigate the changes in your career? Answer: “I always knew I wanted to do something in medicine. In fact, one time my mom found me operating on her favorite doll. I started out in nursing and got my BSN. I worked as a school nurse for a while and I found out very quickly that the youth were not much better in terms of mental health and school problems and that continued to make me want to teach and educate. I just felt a calling to […]

Question: What do you not miss about living in your home before you moved to Friendship Village Answer: “I don’t miss making my bed when it’s time to change the sheets. I hate putting the sheets on the bed. I have someone who comes around every two weeks and puts the sheets on my bed, so all I have to do is take ‘em off! The fitted sheet, it’s too hard to pull that down and get it tucked. I hate doing it!” – Dorothy Gross, resident Friendship Village Sunset […]

Question: What’s a long-standing hobby of yours? Answer: “I’ve grown orchids for 40 years and I had a large number of plants. At one point in time, I had over 600! It was a lot of work, but it was very satisfying and a real pleasure. I had a greenhouse attached to my house, which was very good in the winter. On a sunny day, it’d feel like summer in the greenhouse and most of the orchids would bloom in the winter, so therefore I had summer in the winter. […]

Question: What do you really NOT miss now that you live in Friendship Village? Answer: “I don’t miss cleaning my house. I did all the cleaning and I used to be called Scrubby Dutch because I came from south St. Louis which was know for having a lot of scrubbing Dutch Germans. The Germans used to get out and even scrub their steps. And I didn’t scrub the steps, but my mother did! And I decided when I got older that I wasn’t going to scrub the steps. I took […]

Question: What do you love about creating mosaics? Answer: “Well, I somehow think it’s kind of a creative thing, because one advantage of it is, I get broken dishes and get to smack ‘em up. So, you’re not really spending a lot of money on materials, so most of my mosaic work has been either broken plates or broken mirrors. And if you break something yourself, you kind of create a little memento of what it used to be. And the only thing is, it’s a rather messy process because […]

Question: Looking back, what was something cool you were able to do in your career? Answer: “I wanted to drive in my career. I drove the fire engine in my work with the fire department, I drove Mayor Tucker for a few years, I drove aerial trucks, gas wagons, you name it. I remember interviewing to drive the mayor and I went into his office and he said, ‘Send the rest of them home, I like this kid.’ I met a lot of politicians and different people in my time […]

Question: What has been one of your primary interests? Answer: “Theatre was the most important thing to me. I ran the theatre program while I was teaching at the high school and when I got to Kentucky they were restarting a community theatre program so I went to a meeting, then they asked me if I’d be on a playwriting committee, and the next thing I know they asked me if I could direct the first show so I directed the first one and then a number of shows after […]

Question: Where did your sense of family come from? Answer: “I grew up during the depression and growing up at that time made a big impact on both my husband and I. My parents and grandparents had always been together, and we didn’t have any divorces or anything in our family. Since then, maybe we’ve had distant relatives get divorces, but family was an important part. The people in our community were very stable too. There weren’t many people that were divorced in our community. Everyone had families and we […]