'No big deal' earns honors for volunteer

Winning awards for helping others is becoming commonplace for Frank Crites.

That's not why he spends hours each week helping the Southeast Hospice comfort patients and families for an approaching death. The finest reward, he said, comes when family members tell him how much his volunteer work meant to them in the final hours of a loved one's life.

"I have always said, 'Look, what I have done is no big deal'," Crites said.

But it is a big deal to the hospice, which provides assistance to as many as 50 families at a time, volunteer coordinator Pearla Smith said. She's the person who nominated Crites for his latest award, a Senior Service Award presented Thursday at Southeast Missouri Hospital by Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder.

During the past year, Smith said, Crites has given more than 400 hours and traveled approximately 1,000 miles to help hospice patients. His work includes providing respite care, so family members can have a break from the strain of caring for a terminally ill loved one, or working with those family members to prepare for an impending death.

Crites has been recognized in other ways in the last year, including a volunteer of the year award from the local United Way. "He is just a super volunteer," Smith said.

Kinder created the award as a quarterly recognition project for volunteers across the state in each region served by the local area agencies on aging, spokesman Barry Bennett said. Missouri's lieutenant governor is the state's official advocate for senior citizens.

Anyone may nominate a volunteer, who must be over 60 and provide 40 hours of service in the past year to their community.

Crites started volunteering with Southeast Hospice after he moved to the Jackson area in 2002 after retiring from his post in charge of computer systems in university housing at Southern Illinois University. A preacher's sermon about finding a way to help in the community made a lasting impact, Crites said.

"I just got a calling that I felt I needed to get into this kind of volunteering," he said.