Hollister
– Gordon Byers thought he needed a change of pace when he
retired from teaching English at San Benito High School in
1980.
Hollister – Gordon Byers thought he needed a change of pace when he retired from teaching English at San Benito High School in 1980.
Gordon Byers, 82, said he took an early retirement to maintain what sanity he had left. Within a decade of retiring, Byers became one of the original volunteers at Hollister’s Community Pantry.
In his early retirement years, Byers and his wife, Margaret, took to the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains. The couple ran a ranger station at Alpine Lake in Bear Valley during the summers.
It wasn’t long before the Byerses were back in Hollister year-round, giving their time to volunteer work.
“A lot of teachers have a habit of doing volunteer work,” Byers said. “It’s in our nature.”
He began volunteering in 1989 with fellow former-teacher John Rose when Novice Percival founded the Community Pantry. Byers has volunteered for every type of work at the pantry. Now, he drives a truck Wednesdays and Saturdays to pick up donated food from local supermarkets like Safeway.
“You can’t just retire and sit down and do nothing,” Byers said. “You retire to something, and this is what I retired to.”
On Saturday mornings, he loads an average of 650 pounds of food into the back of the Community Pantry delivery truck.
Mary Anne Hughes, the executive director of the Community Pantry, said Byers is faithful, reliable and always there. Byers cares very much about other people, she said.
“I think being a teacher is good preparation for being a volunteer,” Hughes said. “You learn to roll with the punches.”
Besides the Community Pantry, Byers volunteers for the hospital thrift shop, picking up furniture on Mondays. In all, Byers volunteers up to 20 hours a week, he said.
When he’s not volunteering, Byers helps at his son Jonathan Byers’ saw sharpening shop in Hollister.
His other children include Cindy Boyer, 53, and Timothy Byers, 49. Byers taught all his children at San Benito High School.
“When they were in my classroom I kept telling them, ‘I can’t give you the answers, you’ll have to do it on your own,'” Byers said.
As for volunteer work, Byers enjoys the pace and likes meeting and helping people. He also likes being free of certain teaching duties.
“I don’t tell people, ‘you have to use correct English,'” he said. “I keep my mouth shut.”
Michael Van Cassell covers public safety for the Free Lance. Reach him at 637-5566 ext. 335 or mv*********@fr***********.com.
