Lake Placid High School senior Grace Ericson, John Brown Lives! Executive Director Martha Swan and former town and village Historian Beverley Reid were all named the Distinguished Volunteers of the Year for the village of Lake Placid and town of North Elba.

The three said they volunteer for the love of helping people, benefiting the community, and meeting fellow volunteers. Each had a message to people of all ages to get involved and never stop.

Grace Ericson

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Ericson has volunteered for many years in her life, but she said she’s done a lot in this past year. It’s her senior year of high school and she graduates on June 23. Next year, she plans to attend Fairfield University in Connecticut, and she wants to give back to her community while she still can.

“I realized that maybe next year these opportunities are not going be here for me,” Ericson said. “I wanted to give back to my community, my hometown.”

She has loved seeing the shelves fill at the Lake Placid Ecumenical Food Pantry at St. Agnes Church; learning how important it is to adopt rather than shop at the Tri-Lakes Humane Society; filling Easter baskets during the coronavirus pandemic; ringing the Salvation Army bell and helping with the Holiday Village Stroll around Christmas; participating in the Lake Placid Annual Clean Up Day; helping run the Ironman Lake Placid triathlon and Lake Placid Marathon and Half; and working at Community Day itself.

“This community has given me every opportunity to become a consistent volunteer,” Ericson said. “Each time I volunteer I feel a further sense of gratitude for my hometown. Lake Placid has been an amazing place to grow up in.”

She had some advise for high schoolers coming up.

“Definitely take the opportunities and get involved,” she said.

Ericson said the guidance office and school library are always posting opportunities. She is in school-based volunteer groups like Key Club and the National Honor Society. And she has been part of the Lake Placid Middle-High School Locker Day, showing new students around the school.

“Also, I always do them with my friends, so it’s pretty fun,” Ericson said.

Ericson has probably spent the most time at the Skating Club of Lake Placid as a junior coach teaching the kids how to figure skate. She was a competitive figure skater and when she stopped competing, she still wanted to stay in the skating community.

“It was definitely one of my favorite volunteer opportunities,” she said.

With a beaming smile, she talked about the “tots” stepping out on the ice for the first time and seeing the joy on more experienced skaters’ faces when they learn a new move.

Ericson said her parents — Chris and Catherine — set good examples for her.

“I’m really proud of her,” Catherine said of her daughter. “She’s always involved and giving back to the community.”

While introducing Ericson to the crowd on June 4, Jeremy Freeman, director of events at the state Olympic Regional Development Authority, said the committee had several impressive nominations for volunteer of the year, and it was difficult for them to select just one.

“But to quote one of Grace’s teachers, Grace is ‘super-involved,'” he said. “In addition to being a class officer, she has committed countless volunteer hours to this community. Not only are her hours impressive, they represent a wide range of interests. … Moreover, she takes the lead and is constantly thinking of new volunteer ideas. This is the sign of a lifelong volunteer.”

Martha Swan

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Swan has been helping interpret history at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site for around 24 years with the site’s friends group, John Brown Lives!. The farm is the former home and final resting place of abolitionist John Brown, who fought against slavery and was hanged for treason on Dec. 2, 1859, for leading a raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in what is now West Virginia.

Swan had not known much about John Brown before moving to the area and only learned about his story when she saw a historical marker in Elizabethtown. She figured there needed to be a center for information about his life at the farm where he lived for a spell right in Lake Placid. Now her group helps with numerous exhibits and events at the farm every year.

She felt honored to be nominated by Assemblyman Billy Jones, D-Chateaugay Lake.

Swan feels a lot of resistance from certain portions of society to teaching the complex and difficult parts of history, but she said because that history is complex and difficult, it is all the more important to teach and learn.

“I’ve been thinking an awful a lot lately about the unifying potential of that history,” Swan said. “I found it to bring people together who want to engage the tough history to do better now. … It inspires me. It fuels me. It’s good work.”

Swan said the issues this history raises are still relevant and important

“Our history impacts us,” Swan said.

Awareness of Brown’s farm continues to grow, and Swan said she feels that with more people knowing its history, it is a good sign of progress.

Several years ago, while Swan had a table at Community Day, local business owner Doug Hoffman came to her table, leaned in, and whispered to her that the farm was the “best kept secret in the region.”

“And he didn’t mean it as a compliment,” Swan said. “I thought ‘Oh, we need to change that.'”

His comment charged her with stepping up their game and doing more outreach, bringing in more people and spreading the history more often. One of those efforts is the Adirondack Family Book Festival, a children’s literature event that began last year. The festival will return on Aug. 19 with 14 authors.

While introducing Swan to the crowd on June 4, Mayor Art Devlin said she has served her entire tenure as executive director as a volunteer.

“She has been instrumental in preserving our local history,” he said. “She has been at the forefront of the numerous innovative programs, events and exhibits at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site. Among other things, this includes the ‘Dreaming of Timbuctoo’ exhibit, the Memorial Field for Black Lives and the Freedom Story Project. She has collaborated with the Underground Railroad Historical Association for the annual Juneteenth celebration and with Adirondack Architectural Heritage.”

Beverley Reid

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Reid has been volunteering for around nine decades. What has she done?

“Name it,” she said, and she’s done it, and she gets it from her mother, Audrey.

“She used to say, ‘The more you give, the more you get.'”

Reid volunteered with her mother as long as she can remember, and kept doing it in adulthood.

“It wasn’t alone. It was all of you that were with me,” she told the Community Day crowd.

Everything in Lake Placid is done with volunteers, she said.

When Reid and her husband had their kids the youngsters drew them into their volunteer events, such as Lake Placid Pee Wee Hockey bake sales, where cookies, cupcakes, chili and candy apples left her with a “sticky kitchen.”

“They get you coming and going,” she said of the volunteer seekers.

Her seven children all volunteer, too. So do her nine grandchildren.

“The five great-grandchildren haven’t started yet; they’re not old enough,” she said.

When Reid — who turned 90 years old on Jan. 16 this year — found out she was being honored as a volunteer of the year, she thought, “Oh dear.”

“I said ‘You don’t want me. Get some young people in there,'” she said.

Reid said she volunteers for the kids, whether that’s helping with the 1980 Winter Olympics or helping kids lace up their skates.

During the 1980 Winter Olympics, Reid’s whole family was volunteering, so their house was a flurry of activity. She was on the hockey and speedskating committees. She saw all five of U.S. speedskater Eric Heiden’s races, which he swept that year.

“I was there for the Miracle on Ice, but I had to leave to go to a speedskating meeting,” she said.

Now Reid does a lot of telephone work. She was the town and village historian from 2001 to 2021, and people still call her up with history questions, such as, “Where did John Brown live?”

“That’s an easy one,” she said.

After Lake Placid Community Day was founded in 2018, Reid knew everyone there, but this year, there were many unfamiliar faces.

“That’s all right. We’ll break them in,” she said.

The personal gratification Reid gets out of volunteering is the people she meets along the way.

“Because you make a lot of wonderful friends,” she said. “I have so many friends that if I hadn’t volunteered I wouldn’t have met.

“You’re all my friends,” she added. “I love you all.”

While introducing Reid to the crowd on June 4, Mayor Art Devlin said she has spent decades of her life volunteering for this community.

“As a member of the Adirondack Community Church, she sat on various committees, served as financial secretary for several years and volunteered in the nursery for over 50 years,” he said. “She has served on countless boards including, Lake Placid Memorial Hospital, Lake Placid Pee Wee Association, Lake Placid Alumni Association, Lake Placid Public Library, Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society and Lake Placid Beautification. She also dedicated time to the PTA, speedskating and ice hockey committees during the 1980 Olympics, the Canadian Speed Skating Club and Lake Placid High School. She served as a teacher’s aide at the elementary school and as an election supervisor for the town.”

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Community Day

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Lake Placid Community Day is a joint initiative of the Lake Placid/North Elba Community Development Commission and the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism.

“There are three really important aspects to this celebration,” Community Day Organizing Committee Chair Val Rogers told the crowd before the volunteers of the year were introduced. “Of course, we’re here to honor our volunteers and thank them all. We could not do anything of the things we do in this community without the incredible volunteer presence that we have.”

Community Day brought out a sizeable crowd and said this year brought more organizations than ever before. Community groups — such the Lake Placid Volunteer Ambulance Service, Mirror Lake Watershed Association, Garden Club of Lake Placid and St. Agnes School — set up tables in the pavilion at the North Elba Show Grounds to show off their work and sign up volunteers.

“We usually run around 32, and we’ve got over 40 in there this year,” Rogers said.

In addition to Rogers, members of the committee that organized this year’s Lake Placid Community Day were Karen Armstrong, Denise Bujold, Catherine Ericson, Celeste Gabai, Macie Huwiler, Danielle Lacavalla, Bambi Pedu, Stephanie Pianka, Jill Cardinale Segger and Brian Woods.

“In addition to celebrating our volunteers, this day is also a thank-you to our community as a whole,” Rogers said. “It’s about everyone who lives and works here and makes our community wonderful.”