Number of seniors eating at Carriage House slowly growing

    Nearly a month after county senior citizens were first offered the opportunity to eat lunch on weekdays with Carriage House residents, the number of those doing so has slowly but steadily grown since, with the high water mark of nine having been reached last Wednesday according to manager Steve Dawson.
   “We’ve got seven that are regulars and now that we’ve hit nine I expect we’ll go on to double digits before too long,” Dawson said.  “I think we’ll get close to 20 eventually, but that may take a while.  After the tornado people just got out of the habit of getting together to eat their noon meal.  It’s going to take a while to get them back in that habit.”
   Though he hasn’t yet been able to hold a residents’ council meeting since offering the meals to nonresidents to get feedback on how Carriage House inhabitants feel about the expanded meal service, Dawson said he suspects general satisfaction with the development.
   “I haven’t heard one negative thing about it yet from the residents,” he said.  “And generally if they aren’t happy about something they’re through my door pretty quick.”
     When asked about residents’ acceptance of more neighbors at lunch, Resident’s Council Chair Winnie Fankhouser paused between bites Friday noon to comment, “They seem to have a good time coming here to eat with us and I haven’t heard anyone who doesn’t like having them here.  They generally sit at a table by themselves but several times there’s been too many for that and they’ve shared a table with us.  We all get along fine.”
    Everett and Carol Keller were the very first two seniors to take advantage of Carriage House’s offer June 1 and have become mainstays of the noon meal since.
   “My wife isn’t able to cook anymore so this is quite an outing for us,” he said.  “The food is good and the company is great.”  The Kellers lived in Protection for about a year after the tornado, having returned to Greensburg 13 months ago.
    While the Kellers’ were not regulars at the noon meal at the Senior Center before the tornado, Donald and Stella Hutton were.
   “This (coming to eat at Carriage House) was my wife’s idea,” Hutton said.  “It gets her out of cooking a meal a day and the food here is as good as it was before the storm.”