Schererville gardener energizes club to help community, members
If you think retirement allows you time to smell the roses, talk to Babette Peterson, who is doing that, literally, as president of the Schererville Garden Club. Otherwise, retirement hasn’t slowed her life down one bit.
With only a few months of retirement under her belt after 20 years at GW Berkheimer, Peterson and her husband, John, a U.S. Steel retiree, joined the Schererville Garden Club in 2010, which elected her president and him vice president a few months later when the current president announced suddenly that she was moving.
The Petersons, no strangers to volunteerism, were already some of the founding members of the Illiana Garden Pond Society.
“I told my husband I really don’t want to do this,” she said. “I know from pond meetings it’s a lot of work. Not that I am afraid of it.”
But the membership insisted after witnessing the Petersons’ first few successful months as members. Without much to go on and a group she wasn’t very familiar with, she dove in with her husband by her side, literally.
To her credit, Peterson rekindled a long lost relationship between the club and the Schererville Parks Department, by reaching out to parks staff to identify how the club could be of service. Staff told her they didn’t have enough people to spring clean the parks. Now park cleanups have become annual activities for the group.
“Next year we are going to try to do five parks,” she said. “We only did Redar last year because the weather was so cruddy.”
Anyone who enjoys Schererville parks has the club to thank for its hard work.
Peterson says she devotes April, May and June each year to both clubs, and admits she doesn’t get much else done during that time. Besides park cleanups, springtime includes the annual Illiana Garden Pond Expo in April, where she not only helps the society as their vice president, but also coordinates a booth for the Garden Club. Additionally the club participates in the Celebrate Schererville Parade each June.
Since gardening season has past, Peterson is busy planning for 2014. Next month, the members will participate in a “year in review,” discussing what worked and what didn’t work in 2013.
“I don’t want this to be my club,” Peterson said. “I want it to be our club.”
The club has grown to about 20 members, many of whom are older. Since Peterson spent a few recent years caring for her aging parents, she recognizes the benefits of keeping people engaged and active.
“For many of our members, the club is a social event for them,” she said. “It helps to get them out and keep them going. We’re doing fun things, we help the community, and it helps us, too. We’re learning, we talk, we laugh, and it enriches their lives as much as it enriches mine. I feel like I’m helping people have a better life.”
Each month, club meetings feature educational speakers and plenty of socializing and fellowship as they discuss business and plan activities. The club raises money for Master Gardener program scholarships.
Peterson’s love of gardening came from helping to enrich the life of her mother-in-law. When she and John married 25 years ago, her mother-in-law, in her late 70s at the time, lived with them.
“She was very afraid to come out of her room,” she said. “She was very frail. All she would do is look out her bedroom window.”
Peterson started planting flowers to give her mother-in-law something nice to look at. She also created a pond beneath her window.
“That got me started,” Peterson said. “She appreciated everything I did. As I kept adding things, I made sure it was on her side so she could see it.”
Now the Petersons have a backyard that is landscaped to the hilt. The husband and wife team are very active in the society they helped to found 15 years ago. Peterson said ponding was always in her background.
“My dad had a big pond on his property,” she said.
The couple’s landscaped backyard features a large pond where a swimming pool used to be.
“I love the pond club,” she said. “They are good people. It was started to educate people who wanted to put in a pond or had a pond. We all made mistakes. We wanted to help people not make the same mistakes we made. We wanted to share our group knowledge with the outside world.”
The annual expo serves as a way to educate the public as well as a fundraiser for the group to give back to the community. The society has installed small ponds at different schools for educational purposes and offers college scholarships.
The society supported her when she spearheaded a drive to get supplies to soldiers in Iraq after the country was bombed in 2003. Peterson’s son was stationed in the country at the time, his first tour of duty. For an entire year, the Petersons’ house was transformed into a shipping hub, and the society helped pay for the postage.
“Right after Iraq was bombed, soldiers had nowhere to get their supplies,” she said. “We ran drives and sent 250 boxes to Iraq.”
Her son, Sgt. Robert Pace, took care of the paperwork on the other end for the drive. Even his old school, Peifer Elementary, got involved. When he returned stateside, he paid the students a visit to say “thank you.” Interestingly enough, Halloween is Peterson’s favorite holiday. As a seven-year-old girl, Peterson spent a year bedridden with Rheumatic fever. As a treat, she got to watch Saturday night horror flicks and fell in love with the old classic movies, or “Creature Features,” with monsters like the Mummy, Werewolf, and Frankenstein. To this day, the couple decorates outside every year.
“I build my own bodies,” she joked. “I started with pillows, switched to Styrofoam, and now I’m moving on to wood.”
She said she is always trying to improve their house decorations. This year, she added a projector in the window that projects ectoplasm ghosts onto a sheet. She shared her Halloween spirit with her children, of which she has four by a previous marriage. She said they started making tombstones and built on that, and soon Halloween became a real family affair. John has two kids by a previous marriage. They now have seven grandchildren, adding yet another dimension to an already busy couple. The couple enjoys camping in their spare time.