This will be the 10 th year for the Sargent Family Community Fund Just One Day (JOD) event. It’s called “Just One Day” because on the second Wednesday in July, a group of volunteers get together to do major renovations on a house, (or nowadays, houses), for just one day. Picture a dozen volunteers acting as painters, or gardeners, or cleaners.
Alongside them are some of the best skilled professionals in town, guiding the renovation, stage by stage. I remember the first one was Alice Richardson’s house, on the other side of Main St., across from what is now Summit Homes, but not too far from Sarge’s Sports Pub & Grub.
Alice Richardson in 2015. Allen Wicken The whole thing got started when Craig Sargent looked over and thought he would help her out by mowing her lawn. He estimates she was in her eighties at the time.
Sargent, “I’ve got a big riding tractor. So, I would mow her lawn every year and one year she gave me some jam at the end of the year and she goes, ‘I can’t pay you’. And I said, I’m not doing this to be paid.
And she goes, ‘This is so nice that you do this.’ At one point he looked around and wondered aloud, ‘My god, it must have been so beautiful here years ago.’ “Oh, she started to cry.
So, she goes and shows me pictures of when it was gardens, when there were stone steps out there. So, I knew they (the stones) were all still there.” He didn’t say anything to her, but he had an idea.
He was trying to be respectful, didn’t wan.