Cape senior 'pieces together' pandemic, donates puzzles to Community Partnership

Jim Stricker has had a lifelong fascination with jigsaw puzzles and his hobby has turned into a gift for a Cape Girardeau not-for-profit.

Stricker, 92, has taken seven completed jigsaw puzzles, carefully glued the pieces together and placed them into frames.

He is donating them all to Community Partnership, formerly the Community Caring Council.

Stricker, a resident of Chateau Girardeau’s retirement community, said he’s been putting together puzzles since before he could read.

“My grandmother back in Ohio was really into (puzzles),” Stricker said, “and I recall being 3 years old, standing beside her, and hearing her say, ‘This piece goes here, that piece goes there,’ and so on.”

Stricker has spent the last several years caring for his wife, Betty, who died in February.

Not long after Betty’s death, the pandemic hit America and Chateau Girardeau went into lockdown.

“Puzzles are a good way to consume time,” said Stricker, who is a former CEO of what is now SoutheastHEALTH and, along with his wife, a one-time missionary to Nepal.

Stricker was looking at completed puzzles in his Chateau apartment and had an epiphany to give them to charity.

“I refused to put the beautiful pictures I’d just assembled back into a box,” he said.

“I’ve handled 11,000 puzzle pieces,” Stricker said, “some of them as many as 20 times.”

The finished puzzles display a variety of subjects: New York City, dogs, assorted animals, a waterfall in Brazil, Venice, a train and Yosemite Valley.

“I was a toddler when our family went to Yosemite,” said Stricker, recalling a long-ago trip to California in a Model-T Ford.

A daughter in Eugene, Oregon, has sent him nearly two dozen boxes of puzzles over the years and Stricker has put all of them together except for one.

“You can’t see ’em in their boxes,” he said, noting his only unfinished puzzle to date is a depiction of the Eiffel Tower.

Melissa Stickel, executive director of Community Partnership, said she is “honored” for her organization to receive Stricker’s labor of love.

“(Jim) chose us for this donation,” said Stickel, who has headed the not-for-profit since 2017, “and it represents his obvious passion and dedication of time.”

In a world dominated by cellphones and laptop computers, jigsaw puzzles may seem an outdated recreation to some.

“Think about waiting for a loved one in a hospital and all the interruptions you have in that setting,” Stricker said, “and you can go right back to (the puzzle) whenever you’re ready.”

Another of Stricker’s daughters, who works at Saint Francis Medical Center, helped her father get the framed puzzles ready for an art show at Chateau this past Monday.

Community Partnership will move into the old Cape Girardeau police headquarters on South Sprigg Street in mid-2021.

“We’re not sure what we’ll do with (the puzzles),” Stickel said. “We may hang them in our new offices or we may raffle them off as a fundraiser.”

Either option is fine for Stricker, who adds a bit of advice for anyone contemplating the assembly of a 3,000-piece puzzle.

“Place the border first,” he said, “and bring along with you a lot of patience.”