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WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
The Stubbs - Our First Family
Fifteen years ago, Mary Ellen and Joe Stubb were living in a tiny, freezing, molding house with their five children when their daughter Amanda brought home a flyer from school that would alter the course of their lives. The flyer was about a new organization in Missoula, Habitat for Humanity and it brought with it the possibility of a new home. But this was a new organization, the homes were built entirely from donations and by volunteers, she and her family had no other Habitat homes to look at and know that the venture would be successful and no past partner families to ask for guidance. Was this worth the risk?
The beds in the boys tiny room had to be kept away from the walls because they froze nightly in the winter and Mary Ellen needed to be able to wipe the thawing wetness off the walls each day. The pipes were so rusty that the water from the washer (parked almost on top of the kitchen table) drained directly onto the dirt floor of their basement. The bathroom is so consumed by mold that Mary Ellen attacks it daily with pine sol, but the mold continues to grow and the floor continues to weaken and sag. Yes, becoming a HfH partner family was worth the risk.
Sitting in their warm, tidy, welcoming home Mary Ellen and Joe speak openly and easily about their experiences. Laughter is frequent. Their athletic youngest daughter, Amanda, has just dashed out the door for a softball game. Their seven-year old son Spencer (the oldest son of their oldest daughter, whom they adopted when he was seven months old) scampers energetically around the room. Soon a photo album and scrapbook are brought out.
1991 - Our first partner family gets busy
While Mary Ellen points to pictures and tells stories of Sid Gooley’s smashed fingers and their children learning to pound nails and pull out the ones that went in crooked, Joe shows us newspaper clippings from the ground breaking, framing and dedication. The home was finished in late November and the family was so excited to move in that they spent the entire day before Thanksgiving frantically moving everything they owned into their new home. Mary Ellen ran out and bought a thawed turkey the next morning and the family happily ate their holiday meal on cardboard boxes. There are so many stories to tell.
The construction of their home was an incredible experience for the entire family. They say that the most lasting benefits of being a partner family, besides a home no longer undergoing active decay, are the skills they learned and the bonds they made during the build. Meeting people and connecting with community in ways they would not have otherwise continues to bless the Stubbs with friendship, opportunity and support.
“Living in what you can barely afford… and moving into homeownership is an amazing step,” says Mary Ellen, “It means you are just like the people next door and gives you a huge increase in self esteem. Then you can take that and run with it.”
Amanda in her graduation clothes
And run with it they have. Joe has become a “candy man,” delivering for Sheehan Majestic. No longer needing to wage a daily battle to keep her home from disintegrating and once all of her children were in school, Mary Ellen went back to school to study accounting. She was quickly hired by the city after an internship and continues to grow and thrive in new and more challenging positions. She now runs the Missoula cemetery where she manages all of the bookkeeping and budgets, acts as the resident historian, and is launching a promotional campaign. Growth in her career continues to be enhanced by the friendships and contacts she made as a result of her involvement with HfH Missoula.
Mary Ellen and Joe refer many times to the fact that they know their home “inside and out,” and how empowering this has been for them. This is the first year they have been able to put much money back into their home, but they have maintained and improved their home almost entirely by themselves utilizing the skills learned constructing their house. We all laugh as Joe ruefully admits that he didn’t even know how to use a saw before the building of their home, and we double over when he adds that more than one electrical cord was cut in his learning process. We then admire the beautiful new floor in their kitchen; Joe and Mary Ellen learned well!
The children who ran home from school every day to work on their new home and who sat on stacks of lumber doing their homework with copious amounts of help from the HfH volunteers, are now grown. John and Sarah are now 24. Joshua is 23 and is serving in Iraq with the 163 Infantry Division of the Montana National Guard conducting search missions to find insurgents. He and a fellow Guardsman were personally responsible for the recent capture of a former high-level Iraqi official. Jenny, 20, is in the Navy and expecting her first child in June. Amanda, now 22, is still at home studying to become a nurse with the goal of working in a children’s hospital. She is also busy with sports and being the ultimate cool big sister to Spencer. Mary Ellen asserts that her children’s strong community and service ethic “all comes from what they received” from being part of Habitat. No doubt their parents' success and community involvement were also powerful examples.
2005 - Joshua in Iraq
It is truly amazing and inspiring what this family has accomplished, building considerably on the opportunity Habitat provided. Perhaps most inspiring is how much this family has given back. Mary Ellen served Habitat extensively for many years and continues to be an extremely effective and articulate advocate for HfH. The entire family continues to be active and productive members of the community. And over a period of about seven years, while their children were all still at home, they took in four additional boys who needed a stable home. A strict bathroom schedule imposed to keep some semblance of order amongst eleven people in a four bedroom, one bath home. But Mary Ellen says that their new home felt so large and abundant, they welcomed these boys in without a second thought. And now they are starting all over with Spencer, gearing up for gymnastic meets and little league practice.
Getting together at the lake
We are shown around their well kept home filled with happy memories, and we wander out into the nicely done yards. Fenced houses now line the ridges, but for the first few years the neighborhood children would spend hours tubing down the steep hills with such speed it would carry them up the next hill. Once, while braving “suicide hill,” Jenny knocked a couple of teeth loose, but that was the most serious injury reported.
Mary Ellen stresses the importance of community in the continued success of HfH Missoula. She points out that their home was built entirely from donations and support seemed to materialize when they needed it most – even after the home was finished and sometimes without even asking! One final story: once the house was finished there hadn’t been time to do any landscaping before winter, so that spring found the house surrounded by mud with planks providing safe paths into the house. In April, their daughter Amanda started to cry every evening at bedtime. After a few days she revealed to Mary Ellen that she was afraid that since they had no grass, the Easter Bunny would not visit them that year. Mary Ellen assured her daughter that it would all work out. The very next day Larry Nelsen knocked on her door; he had been laying sod in the neighborhood, had a little left over and wondered if she could use it. There was just enough grass for the Easter Bunny to work his magic a week later.
There were heartbreaks and shocks along the way as well. To prospective partner families, Mary Ellen cautions that that “the process is a bumpy ride and at times you can wonder if it’s all worth it.” But she is sure that the rewards worth the commitment, publicity, uncertainty and invasion that the process often requires. “The feeling on the build site, the support, the feelings of self-esteem, being self-sufficient and the self confidence you gain are all worth it.” She advises to always be honest with Habitat, trust that things will work out and stay committed to the dream of homeownership. It is clear that homeownership and their ties to the community have served the Stubbs well, and in turn, they continue to serve the community well.
--- Jerda Smeltzer
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