By Marcel Pacatte
In 1970, adventurer Thor Heyerdahl set sail across the South Atlantic in a boat made of papyrus to prove a point. The Beatles broke up. The High Dam on the Nile at Aswan, Egypt, was completed.
And a young insurance agent in Jacksonville signed on with Chapter 409 of AMBUCS, a nonprofit community service organization creating accessible and adaptive communities. The local AMBUCS group was just six years old when Terry Lease became a member.
Recently, Lease was honored for his steady 56 years of membership with the organization, which means Chapter 409 now is 62 years old, and both Lease and AMBUCS still are contributing to the community.
On Thursday, June 11 at The Links Golf Course is the Jacksonville AMBUCS’ 26th annual golf outing and 59th annual benefit auction to raise money for projects that are designed to help people conquer challenges related to mobility, such as building ramps and providing Amtrykes, a customized tricycle to help both children and adults enjoy the freedom of controlling their own movement.
Fellow longtime AMBUCS and Big Hat Club member Chuck Krell, left, sits with Terry Lease during the recent presentation of an AMBUCS 50-year pin to Lease.
Lease organized the auction for several years when it was a two-day affair, and it basically was an all-year preparation. His duties related to that included soliciting and collecting items to be sold and assembling a cadre of auctioneers to sell the items donated by community members and businesses.
Right now, Lease and his wife, Jan, are busy keeping track of a dozen ducklings and their mallard mother as the brood zips around the courtyard at Cedarhurst of Jacksonville, but you’d be mistaken if you thought he wasn’t also keeping tabs on his fellow ‘BUCS — you don’t stick with a crew for 50 years and not wonder or lose interest.
And that relationship is a two-way street: AMBUCS member John Eyth stops by each week to visit the Leases before heading off to the group’s meeting, providing other members with an update on Terry Lease and, no doubt, passing along a story or anecdote from him. Lease is the first to tell you that the group is a lively bunch, although perhaps not as rambunctious as the chapter members in Springfield. But that’s another tale for another day.
The tale for this day is about a gentleman, now 80, with an enviably erect posture who has put in his time … the tale of a gentleman with a twinkle in his eye and the slight smile that crosses his face as he prepares to softly and deliberately launch into another tale to let you know that the spirit still is willing and the stories still are searching for an audience.
He is focused on the matter at hand, chronicling his time with the group and some of the important work they did in Jacksonville during Lease’s time at the helm and more active membership, supporting Pathway Services Unlimited and Camp Courage, among others, but he also wants to talk about the time he and two Army buddies starting a leave were hitchhiking home from Fort Leonard Wood and were bounced from the car after Lease referred to the grandchildren of the couple who had offered them a ride.
“Those aren’t my grandchildren,” the affronted woman said. She, her husband and their children continued on after depositing Lease and his buddies back on the road’s shoulder. The three found another ride after Lease agreed to keep his own counsel regarding any urchins on board, and — this is the point of relating the tale — laugh about it among themselves to this day.
Heyerdahl, the adventurer, had a point to make — that people could cross great distances and interact with other populations — as he sailed oceans in boats designed by ancient mariners and that had been constructed with material the mariners used centuries ago. Lease’s adventures may have been more modest — no oceans traversed, he — but his point is no less true than Heyerdahl’s, that people matter, whether, in Lease’s case, you’re helping them or whether you’re in league with those doing the helping.
That’s why he cares about AMBUCS and about the people served by the group through the years.
And that’s why it bothers him that over his 56 years involved with the organization, times have changed and that young people aren’t joiners as they once were, and don’t contribute to their communities in the ways they once did.
Times change. He gets that.
But he says he thinks that if people understood the power of an AMBUCS project, if they could see people using their Amtryke for the first time — “If they could watch what the club has done for others” — that they would want to be a part of that.
And, he notes, the 125 bucks it costs annually to be a member isn’t that dear a price to pay to contribute to the community.
His advice for joining AMBUCS is the same as his advice for life: “Don’t be afraid to grab onto it.”
Sitting back and letting things go by is not in Lease’s nature. He goes all-in on anything he does, whether it is his career as an insurance agent, his marriage, raising his three children with his wife, or drumming up members for AMBUCS.
Which is a sneaky way of talking about that hat.
Members — but not every member — can get a 10-gallon hat, and while the hat is a big part of all things AMBUCS, what really matters are the various pins that get added to the hat, and the membership cards Lease kept inside the hat to pull out at the most opportune moment: A salesman knows how to close a deal.
If an AMBUCS member recruits three people to the organization in a 12-month period, the hat and a pin are issued. Taking a look at Lease’s hat tells the story of his commitment to making the organization thrive, adding new blood throughout his association with the group.
The Big Hat Club is an honor organization within AMBUCS, and Lease has been in it for just about as long as he has been an AMBUCS member.
First he joined, then he recruited, then he was inducted as a Big Hat Club honoree and shortly after that he became a life member, all within a few years of having joined. He also served as president of the local chapter and was active at the district level of the organization.
And while Lease definitely is an AMBUC through and through, it’s not the sum of his existence. Terry and Jan Lease for years organized a bluegrass festival, and other performances in Jacksonville.
They didn’t gravitate to bluegrass because of that Beatles breakup. They always liked the music, they attended the festival, they saw that the festival could use a rudder and that was all it took. For, oh, 28 or 29 years.
They have made as many friends through bluegrass as they have through AMBUCS; one notable association is
Allison Krauss, whom they first knew as a prodigy on the brink of her fame.
The High Dam at Aswan was a technological marvel on a par with Egypt’s pyramids. It harnessed the Nile in a way the first dam hadn’t, bringing an end to the unpredictable drought-and-flood cycle along the river. It took ingenuity and a commitment to progress. It brought Egypt into the modern era.
That’s where we connect to Lease and the Jacksonville AMBUCS: He and the service club brought Jacksonville to a place it wouldn’t have been without the effort and foresight and commitment to the community. The projects over the years, large and small, are almost ubiquitous.
Lease sums it up: “We played hard and we worked hard.”
And Pathway, he says, always has been up front when it comes to projects the AMBUCS undertook.
He’s not sure he’ll be up for attending the auction, golf outing or dinner, but you can be sure he won’t miss a beat of what transpires; Eyth will see to that.
And in the meantime, if you’d like to stop by Cedarhurst and visit the Leases and hear some tales, they are all-in on that as well, whether you go all the way back to 1970 or stop off somewhere along the way.
