(Editor’s note: The Era uses fictitious names when featuring ELF
Fund beneficiaries to protect their privacy.)

Derrick City woman Mae Foote has been involved with the ELF
(Era’s Less Fortunate) Fund in one way or another for years.

When her husband died nearly 20 years ago, Foote told The Era at
her home Friday, she started going to the Greater Bradford Area
Senior Activity Center. There, she would help out with wrapping
gifts for the ELF Fund.

“It made our Christmas so much brighter,” Foote said. “We’d all
sit and laugh and joke. It was nice just to be involved,” she said,
adding many of the ladies there, including herself, no longer had
young children to buy Christmas gifts for.

“I think the ELF Fund is a wonderful organization,” she said,
adding she still goes to the Senior Center to wrap ELF Fund gifts
when she can find transportation into town.

“I’d wrap them here if they’d bring them to my house,” Foote
laughed.

Only recently, did she become an ELF Fund beneficiary in the
more traditional sense. A couple of years ago, someone anonymously
filled out an ELF Fund application on her behalf, she said.

“It was a real joy opening it,” she said of her gift that year,
“because I didn’t know who it was from.”

Receiving from the ELF Fund is bittersweet, however, she
intimated. For someone who has worked hard all her life to take
care of herself and her family, asking for help is not easy.

Foote was raised in Bradford and attended West Branch School
until the age of 15. At about that time, her father became very ill
with stomach cancer, she said, so she left school and started
working to help her mother make ends meet.

Soon to be 81-years-old, Foote said, she worked two jobs most of
her life – at The Old Willows, the Congress Street Cafe (now
Bloomer’s Florist), Buttercrust Bakery, J.C. Olson, Woolworth’s,
Johnson’s Restaurant and other downtown restaurants and
businesses.

“We always worked hard for what we had,” Foote said.

Growing up, though, there was no ELF Fund or public assistance
to provide relief for the needy, she said. But she remembers there
were soup kitchens and some area churches that gave out food and
gifts at Christmas time.

At times a beneficiary of organizations like the Salvation Army,
the Visiting Nurse Association and Rebuilding Together (formerly
Christmas in April), Foote has always tried to give back to her
community, volunteering at her church, Grace Lutheran, with the
Salvation Army, the ELF Fund and similar programs.

Years ago, she said, the local American Legion collected toys
and cleaned them, re-painted them or otherwise tried to restore
them to give them away to needy children.

“They’d bring boxes of dolls and we’d sit here in my living room
and wash them up and paint them … we had a ball,” Foote said.

Eventually, her age and two major health problems forced her to
stop working and apply for Social Security.

Foote has been on insulin injections to control diabetes for 15
years, she said, and now uses insulin twice a day. Last July, she
said, she had open heart surgery at St. Vincent Hospital in Erie
and now has a pacemaker.

Covering the expenses associated with those health problems and
maintaining her home, where she has resided since she was married
in 1961, she said, can sometimes be overwhelming. Foote, however,
never lets her financial hardship dampen her spirits.

“I have God … I truly believe that He provides,” she said,
becoming emotional. “I have had what God wanted me to have.” Her
family and neighbors are proof that she is blessed, she said,
helping her with her financial needs, transportation and even her
yard work.

This year for Christmas, with her son on the road driving a
tractor-trailer across the country and her grandchildren and
great-grandchildren scattered about, Foote said, she is looking
forward to celebrating the holidays with some friends from Olean,
N.Y.

Her Christmas wish, as she wrote on her ELF Fund application, is
a modest and humble “something pretty … thank you.”

When asked to elaborate on her wish, Foote replied, “I’m nearly
81-years-old. I’m not going out to a big, fancy party or anything,”
she said, suggesting a blouse or sweater. “Something a little
glittery … a little Christmas sparkle.”