Curtis Gilmore - Minoru Yasui award winner for July 2009
written by Gary Massaro - The Villager
Curtis Gilmore got his start in volunteering the old-fashioned way. His mother volunteered him.
“I had some good training,” he said. “My mother was a high school teacher and counselor. Whenever there was a need to move chairs and things like this, somehow she always volunteered me.” Marriage didn’t stop the roping in.
“My wife, Jane, has been very active in a lot of things,” Gilmore said. “I would say that I was a gofer for her. It finally dawned on me that if I did some things on my own, it would be less work for me.”
Yeah sure.
Gilmore needs a calculator to add up all the hours he has spent in 37 years of volunteering – from Jefferson County Public Schools to the Jefferson Foundation, from Arvada Wheat Ridge Service Ambassadors for Youth to Computers for Kids.
All that adds up to Gilmore being named the Minoru Yasui Community Volunteer recipient for July. He’s receiving the award July 23 at the DTC Marriott. The award is named for the late Denver lawyer, community activist and super volunteer.
Gilmore, 75, makes his living as a petroleum engineer. He studied at the University of Texas and also Colorado School of Mines. He worked for Amoco a lot of his professional life. And now he owns Gilmore Production.
But he started out wanting to be a cowboy or plow boy. “I started at Colorado State University,” he said. “But I was allergic to everything that grew. So I decided agriculture wasn’t for me.” He transferred to Texas to study stuff under the ground.
He graduated, then joined the Navy. After he was discharged, he came back to Lakewood, where his mother had more plans for him, namely, making sure he and neighbor Jane Groninger kept in touch.
Gilmore was working in Wyoming and would come home when he had time off. “Every time I came home, Jane happened to be at the house,” Gilmore said. They had been chemistry lab partners at Wheat Ridge High School. They have been married since 1963. When their daughters were growing up, they volunteered at school.
“When you’re around the school a lot, the kids never think anything of it,” Gilmore said. “It’s an excellent way to keep tabs on them and their friends. You got to know the families of the people they hung around with. It was a nice way to make sure there weren’t any hurdles in their way that they couldn’t get over. And if there was a problem, you could head it off fast.”
After the girls were done with high school, Gilmore continued to volunteer.
“The best way to stay young is to work with young people,” he said. “If you retire and sit around and watch television, your mind’s going to turn to mush.”
So Gilmore worked with the Jefferson Foundation, a non-profit that provides scholarships to students. He became a big promoter of Computers for Kids when he noticed schools, businesses and just plain people throwing away old computers. So he recruited some friends to take the castoffs and install new hardware, in turn giving them to kids in need, roughly 1,600 in the last five years.
“In this day and age I don’t know how a kid competes if he doesn’t have one at home,” Gilmore said. “If we want to close the achievement gap, it’s very tough if a kid doesn’t have the tools.”
Gilmore also was a co-founder of Arvada Wheat Ridge Service Ambassadors to Youth, which mentors at-risk students.
Longtime friend and former Yasui winner Bill Johnson said he’s a big fan of Gilmore. “He works until it’s done right,” Johnson said. “It’s a lot of work that he goes through.”
Gilmore said volunteering keeps him connected. “I find that a lot of people who don’t stay active, particularly people around my age, don’t understand the world or what the younger generation thinks,” he said. “The world has changed a lot in the last 50 years, technologically and also socially.”
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written by Gary Massaro - The Villager