Mary Facen - Senior Spotlight
By Barbara W. Russell
As I waited in the Pooler-Bloomingdale Senior Citizens Center to interview Mary Facen, I didn’t know what to expect. Well, actually that’s not exactly true - I fully expected her to be a frail older woman with white hair, who would probably be using a walking cane or maybe even a wheelchair, so I was in for a surprise when she walked through the door. Mary Facen did not fit my expectations - she looked more like someone who might be the center’s director. She was poised and smiling, and impeccably dressed in a white suit. I might have guessed that she was about 40, but certainly not almost 70! I laughed with surprise when she told me her age, and she laughed too, obviously happy and enjoying a full and active life.
Facen and her husband, Henry, moved to Pooler about 2 ½ years ago from Long Island, New York. This is their retirement home, and they’ve made many new friends in the area, all of whom they’ve met at the center.
“It’s like family here with all of us and anyone who comes here,” she tells me. “A new person comes in - we welcome them and make them feel right at home, and they fit in within a couple of days. You develop a lot of friendships, and we also do things together on the outside.”
One of Facen’s new friends had also moved here from New York. “She lived right around the corner from me in New York,” says Facen, “she walked through my block all the time, but we never knew each other, and we met here at the center!
“Moving here has been a big change for me, but it’s been a good change. The norm is that when you retire you think you’ll be sitting back doing nothing, and you won’t have anything to keep you busy, but that’s not the case here – these are some swinging senior citizens and you would have to run to keep up with us!
“Being at the center is like a full-time job because we’re always active and doing something. Recently we started bowling and we’re looking into having a senior league. We crochet and quilt, play bingo and pokeno (a card game like bingo), celebrate birthdays once a month, and have fish frys – they’re always coming up with different ideas and activities.
“I’m relearning to crochet and learning to quilt. We’ve got some serious quilters here. They enter craft shows every year and win prizes all the time. We made blankets for Christmas, and I made 20 blankets to give away.
“Once we had a tea party with finger sandwiches and everything, and we all dressed up in old fashioned dresses. People told about what they had on, and where it came from. Some of our seniors are in their nineties, and they had jewelry that had been given to them by their grandparents. It was a fun day.
“The men like to play pool, and they have their own pool room in the back. They like to play pool a lot, but there are many activities, trips and outings where both the men and women are involved.
“It’s an exciting place. We’re very active – if you joined you’d be tired at the end of the week!”
Facen’s husband, Henry, is a firm believer that the more active you are, the longer you will live, and it looks like they’re setting out to prove it.
Being busy is nothing new to Facen. She earned her master’s degree in social work, and she worked for 26 ½ years as a social worker in New York while raising five children – all of whom have successful careers of their own. Henry retired from the New York Transit. He is an active (and very good, says his wife) golfer, and they do a great deal of traveling around the country when he competes in tournaments.
Their children are grown, but they maintain close family ties. Facen will never forget that it was her own mother and father who gave her the motivation and patience to be successful as a career woman and as a mother. “We were a big family and very close,” she told me. She had one brother, three sisters and three step-sisters.
“My dad was not highly educated. He worked as a steelworker for Catapiller, but his biggest goal was to have his children educated,” said Facen, “and he got his wish. He raised us ‘as boys’ to ‘Take care of your family and pay your bills.’ He was a strong influence in my life.”
Facen was happy in her chosen field of social work. “I loved working,” she said. “I worked with children who were 14-21 years old, the ones everyone else had given up on. My specialty was the most difficult child, the ones who no one else could do anything with, and my biggest joy was to watch them get themselves together.” She kept them out of the hospital, kept them from suicide and got them going on to college.
“I think God sent me down here for them because I’ve always been one to help people.” she said. “From my parents I was given the sense of caring for and needing to help people. I only wish they were alive to see it.
“My job was to get them (the children she worked with) to where they were stable back in society so they could be helpful to society. The kids I worked with in New York believed there was no future for them, and I had to instill it in them. I’d tell them, ‘There is a future for you - you have to make your own future.’
“Many of those kids have made a future for themselves. I still get calls down here from kids who have called back to my former job to find out where I am and to talk to me to tell me what they achieved, because I used to say – ‘I don’t care if you go out there to be a welder – be the best welder you can be’.”
Facen tells me the story of one of her students who followed her advice explicably: “There was a young man at our school who was mentally challenged,” she says, “but he was very good with his hands and he took a liking to welding. We sent him to a tech school and he started welding. When he finished they sent him on a job that started him off at $13.00 an hour. He was so good that they sent him to a welding school which brought his pay up to $24.00 an hour!”
Facen also supervised some college students who were studying to be social workers. They worked with her as they were completing internships, and she was once asked to be an adjunct professor. “I had to say no because it would take up too much of my time,” she said, “but I still hear from some of those students too.”
“Where did you get your patience to work with difficult children all day and then return home to care for your own five children?” I ask. “From my mom,” she replies without hesitation. “I only once in my life saw my mother really angry. She always taught us about being patient and being understanding. Our children were taught to be independent children. We did not have many problems with them - they were good kids. We always taught education – education is a big thing.”
Of her five children, three went to college and two didn’t, but they all have promising careers, and she raised nieces and nephews and helped send them to college too. Her father’s desire for education continues to pass down through their family. A granddaughter who is a straight A student has recently been accepted to Stevens Institute of Technology. It’s a prestigious college where she’ll be studying science and research.
Facen’s advice to the younger generation is: “The one thing they’ve got to do is educate themselves. Not every kid is geared for college,” says Facen, “I say – take what that child is good at and utilize on that.”
Education and family - two things that are most important to Facen. I ask her how her large family has managed to stay so close when we live in a time when this is not the norm.
“We were raised to be loving and caring for your family. Our family is very close knit – all of us. If something happens to one, it happens to everyone,” she says.
She means what she says. Last year she spent three months traveling between California and New Jersey to help care for one of her sisters and a daughter-in-law who both had cancer.
“We’re in contact,” she continues. “That’s one thing I insist – I brought my children up to believe no matter where you are, no matter where you travel, always call home. So I am in touch with my family at least once or twice a week.”
She also stays in contact with her friends, and retiring in Pooler was a direct result of her staying in contact with a special friend named Henrietta Gwen.
“We’ve been friends for over 40 years, and we’re very, very close,” says Facen, “and when her (Gwen’s) husband died unexpectedly, she moved to Pooler to be close to her family. My husband and I had been looking for a place to retire for five years, and we came for a visit and looked around and decided to retire here.
“My girlfriend said, ‘You’ve got to join! (the senior center),” and that’s one of the first things they did, and it’s what Facen enjoys the most about retirement in Pooler. “Being at the center and being with a group of people you can identify with that are loving and caring and just have fun with – That’s it!”
Her enthusiasm for life is contagious, and she says it’s a result of “Just living life, and working hard, and helping others.” One of her happiest memories is of when she went back to college after 20 years and earned her master’s degree, and her husband surprised her with a trip to Hawaii – it was a trip well deserved.
Meanwhile, their lives haven’t slowed down a bit.
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