Bucks County Herald - September 14, 2006
Boyce Budd to
Dear Friends,
Good morning. Last week, I had a visit with Boyce Budd, the Chairman of Tinicum Township’s Supervisors. I’d heard that he and a friend packed a 5,500-pound trailer with supplies and materials and drove to New Orleans to help Katrina disaster residents. They spent several weeks there last April.
First, here’s some background on Boyce and his wife, Karen. How often do you meet someone who’s won an Olympic gold medal? Boyce and his teammates captured the Gold at the 1964 Olympic games in Tokyo.
Heavy weight crew was his sport. In it, eight men row a 70-foot shell over a 2,000-meter course (about 1 ¼ miles) in just over five minutes…the equivalent of running a four-minute mile. These men average six feet five and weigh 240 pounds. What’s more incredible is that they’re rowing a 200-pound boat, plus oars and a coxswain who only steers. As you know, I spend my early morning hours on the Schuylkill River. We get out of the way when an “8” bears down upon us. It’s like watching a freight train roaring by.
Three years after moving to Tinicum ten years ago, Boyce successfully ran for office. He’s in his second, six year term. Karen is the President of Tinicum’s open space program. It’s convinced more than 60 property owners to set aside 3,000 (plus) acres for open space…permanently. Tinicum leads Bucks County municipalities in open space protection, Boyce told me. Its voters approved spending $5 million in taxes to do so. In a week or two, we’ll visit this success story.
Boyce’s humanitarian journey to New Orleans began because an old rugby friend convinced him to join forces and help Katrina victims. His email letter to me spoke volumes. “We arrived in New Orleans in a city that looked much as I imagined Chernobyl!” Boyce wrote, referring to the Russian nuclear plant disaster. “The city was flat as a pancake, with a grid road network, with street after street lined with abandoned houses, shops, cars and piles of junk.
“There was indescribable filth and odor everywhere,” he continued. “How would you handle the loss of your home, your job…nowhere to turn…no one to help,” Boyce asked me? I had no answer. “Each story was terrible… absolutely numbing. There were thousands of people in various stages of mental depression.”
Ten from an Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C, teamed up with Boyce and his friend. In New Orleans, they made their headquarters in the St. Luke’s Episcopal church, which had previously been a Greek Orthodox Church, now the religious home to a mostly African American congregation. Boyce told the story of Anthony, the sexton who was living in the church bell tower. To protect his job at the Superdome and his government pension, Anthony had to get to work each day…while his wife and daughter were living temporarily in Houston, Texas. Anthony cleaned up the church at night and on weekends.
Boyce and his fellow workers spent day after day, ripping walls apart, digging through the sludge...readying ruined homes for repairs. Back breaking, “It was filthy, hot, heavy, and thoroughly gratifying work,” his email reported.
He was critical of how every level of government failed New Orleans residents who were mostly poor and black. Seeing row upon row of still empty FEMA trailers was heart wrenching. “Nobody knew what to do,” Boyce added referring to governmental red tape and buck passing.
“But there are signs of hope,” he said. Teams like his are making an impact. “We painted a house in a single day,” he told me. Boyce will always remember attending the Palm Sunday service at St. Luke’s with its fabulous black choir, making joyful music.
His email concluded with this challenge: “If you have a chance to donate to an Adopt-a-New Orleans organization, do it. If you want a special experience, buy a round trip ticket to New Orleans and hitch up with Habitat for Humanity or some local program for a week of some heavy duty manual labor that many, many Americans are more than willing to do.”
Boyce Budd’s tale is compelling.
You can reach him at Tinicum’s headquarters:
Sincerely,
Charles Meredith