JABA volunteer Marilyn Fantino serves as coordinator for the organization’s food bag program. The position was meant to be temporary, but she’s held it now for 14 years. Photo: Jackson Smith
Food for thought
Don’t tell JABA volunteer Marilyn Fantino to slow down
At 81, Marilyn Fantino may actually be older than many of those she serves as coordinator of the Jefferson Area Board for Aging’s Food Bag program, which provides groceries to low income seniors. Just don’t tell her to take it easy or be careful.
“I’ve always been independent,” she laughed, sitting in the light-filled living room of her Ivy home, surrounded by photos of her children and grandchildren. “In a sense, that’s created problems, and in a sense it’s given me great peace.”
As a girl growing up in Depression-era Kingsport, Tennessee, Fantino said, her family, once well-to-do, never financially recovered and lived on a modest income.
“That makes me the survivor I am today,” she said. “I can adapt to most anything.”
While her parents could no longer afford to employ household help, an African-American woman who’d once worked for them returned to live in their home, and their close relationship shaped Fantino’s feelings about the racism that surrounded her.
“When I was a junior or senior in high school, I made a speech about being color blind,” she recalled, noting that she also turned down an invitation to join an all-white sorority because she had an “innate sense of inclusiveness.”
That sense served her well when, after graduating high school as valedictorian and attending Emory & Henry College, she moved to Albemarle County and took a job teaching English at Albemarle High School in 1963, during the forced desegregation of schools following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Fantino recalled helping Albemarle High Principal Benjamin Hurt coordinate the mingling of previously separate students and teachers. “It was a lot of change,” she said.
Fantino stayed at the school for 34 years, serving as the chair of the English Department for 17 of them, teaching thousands of students in the process, and raising her own three sons. When she retired in 1997, she said, she sought ways to stay busy, and became a volunteer at both the Virginia Festival of the Book and at JABA in its reading program. When she was asked to help out with JABA’s new food bag program in 2000, Fantino agreed to do it for a limited time.
“For about 14 years now, I’ve been the temporary coordinator,” she said with a sly smile.
The program provides two bags of groceries per month to 76 seniors in Charlottesville and surrounding counties, and deliveries are brought to senior centers in Fluvanna and Nelson counties, the Esmont Senior Center, and the Mary Williams Senior Center at the Jefferson School City Center in Charlottesville.
Fantino coordinates the money, the volunteers, the shopping, and the deliveries, and spends particular time thinking about the types of foods that will be most helpful to hungry seniors, avoiding foods that will spoil or might not mix well with medications.
“People think it’s simple, but it’s very complex,” she said, describing visiting multiple grocery stores during shopping trips to make sure she gets the most bang for her limited bucks.
Asked how long she plans to stick with it, she’s thoughtful for a moment.
“One reason I have to quit is there’s people I taught that could be in this program,” she said, cracking a grin once again. That’s not enough to slow her down.
“It’s not always easy when you get older,” she said, “but you need a purpose to get up and move.”—C.S.