SpringfieldNewsSun.com

Gretta Runyan thought spending the winter in Florida was great and that turning 70 would be the highlight of her year.

Then the Junior Service League called to say she and two others — Mary Lu Noonan and Lori Bartell — would receive the league's first awards for distinctive service.

Saying she felt "blessed and overwhelmed," Runyan remembered the league as a place where she was able to reach out in the community, make friends and perform community service for "just an outstanding, well-organized philanthropic organization" and do what she was born to do: volunteer.

"I can't imagine me not volunteering," Runyan said.

Her volunteering resume includes the Volunteer Service Bureau, Meals on Wheels, the Children's Library, Zonta and the Emmaus Community.

But as a breast cancer survivor herself, she may be best known for her work with other women before and after mastectomies, in creating support groups for those facing the disease and in establishing the Breast Cancer Endowment Fund of Clark County, Inc., to provide financial support for women with breast cancer.

Bartell said Junior Service League helped her to develop friendships and to get to know the community and its needs in an intimate way.

"I would have never known that Meals on Wheels was more than delivering a tray of hot food," Bartell said. To the housebound people who seldom saw others, "that was a human outreach," she said.

Her volunteering in the pediatrics department at Community Hospital, where "we would rock babies and help family members" turned out not only to be a "wonderful experience," she said, but helped prepare her for the Christmas when her son was hospitalized beneath a tent that helped him to breathe more easily.

Then there was her love-hate relationship with the Bargain Big Top — a yearlong service project she chaired.

The undertaking not only required that she organize her family and friends to collect enough used clothing and toys to fill the floor of Memorial Hall, it allowed her to see those clothes and toys get into the hands of children that needed them — and a certain suit coat onto the back of a man who planned to wear it to church.

"Those are some of the good, fond memories I have of Junior Service League," she said.

Her other community activities include involvement with Ridgewood Private School, the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the Wittenberg Guild and the board of Mercy St. John's Center when it was developing Oakwood Village.

Noonan's Junior Service League work goes back to the organization's beginning. She was a founding member, was its second president in 1935, and organized the first Junior Service League Follies — a performance starring JSL members and with a director and costuming shipped in from New York.

"We all started it," Noonan said.

Later a president of the Young Woman's Mission, Noonan recalls 1935 being a particularly crowded year.

"I was graduating, got engaged, and we had the first Junior Service League Follies in the Fairbanks Theater," she said, referring to what was attached to the current National City Bank Building.

All that activity "just about knocked me out," she said.

"Goodness, I was busy, wasn't I?"

She has remained busy in groups including Oesterlen Services for Youth, the Opportunities Industrialization Center, the Community Hospital Independent Endowment Found, the Clark County Council for Retarded Children, in generous support for Wittenberg University, and as chair of the Noonan foundation — all the while maintaining her interest in thoroughbred horses.

Runyan and Bartell said Noonan, now 93, has performed another important service along the way.

"She was a mentor to many, many people," Runyan said — including her two sister honorees.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-

0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

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