Persistence Paid

Persistence Paid

When Maisie DeVore sets her mind on something, stay out of the way because it’s going to happen. No matter how long it takes.

Consider, for example, her dream of building a swimming pool for her hometown of Eskridge, Kan. (pop. 589). The idea took root years ago when DeVore’s two youngest children, then 7 and 8, complained they had nothing to do.

“They didn’t like to play ball and that’s the only thing for them in this town,” she says. DeVore decided they needed a swimming pool, but the nearest pool was in Alma, Kan., a 40-mile round trip.

So DeVore decided she’d pay for the pool by collecting and redeeming aluminum cans. She knew it was possible because she once helped band students finance a trip to Texas this way.

At first it was a one-woman operation. “I collected cans for years with no help,” she says, sometimes selling them for as little as 5 cents a pound.

“People here remember seeing a woman picking up cans along the highway in 1978,” says Rodney Allen, DeVore’s grandson and president of the DeVore Swimming Pool Association. “It’s a project she really worked hard on. She persevered the whole time.”

Some people called her “Crazy Maisie” for pursuing the project, but that didn’t deter DeVore. Even her husband told her she would never live to see it.

“Well, I did,” DeVore beams.

For more than 30 years, she sold aluminum cans, homemade jams and jellies, scrap metal and old appliances, and raffled off quilts and afghans for the pool fund. Word of her mission spread and people left money in wills; dropped off cans, scrap metal, and old appliances; and saved jars for her jams and jellies. Even actress Glenn Close donated $2,000 (DeVore was an extra in the Sarah Plain and Tall movies, starring Close).

Eventually DeVore raised nearly $100,000 for the pool—mostly from cans—and that, combined with a $73,000 grant from the Kansas Department of Wildlife & Parks, provided the money to make her dream a reality. In 2001, Maisie’s Community Swimming Pool opened with a splash.

“Everybody was ready for it,” she says. “Especially me.”

“Like others I was skeptical it would ever happen,” says Bruce McKee, pool contractor. “It was never easy, but she didn’t give up. I’ll always be proud to have been involved with this.”

Now that the pool is built, DeVore says, “I’m not going to work as hard but I’ll keep on.”

The pool has maintenance costs, after all. So DeVore still picks up cans on a five-mile trip around Lake Wabaunsee once a week on Sunday evening, and once a month on a route in the country with 15 stops. “Some are crushed, others aren’t,” she says.

Many evenings DeVore still can be seen crushing cans in her garage. “I spend 7 to 8 hours a week crushing cans,” she says. “I try to keep up.”

When the garage is full and her car will barely fit inside, that makes about 900 pounds of cans—enough to fill a truck that travels once a month to a recycling center in Topeka, 35 miles away.

Pausing from her can crushing, she looks across the street at the pool where her great-grandchildren are swimming.

“It’s all worth it, seeing the kids enjoy the pool,” she says.

Diana West is a freelance writer in Joplin, Mo.

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