Never too young to volunteer

I know I must make it sound like everyone at the railway is a retiree or geezer, but that is not the case. There are younger folks around, including married couples with children. John and Judi Dauphin from Illinois come up almost every weekend to work. They do all sorts of heavy duty stuff around the place, and they both are qualified to engineer the trains and act as conductor. Judi serves as engineer for the diesel and John does both diesel and steam.

Their son Matt, age 8 and 11/12 (his birthday is in early September), also helps out around the place. He does just about anything he is asked to do, and he helps out in the gift shop by cleaning up, keeping an eye on the weather, monitoring the lights that are always burning out, restocking items and making sure we are doing the sales right on the new POS. Other days he runs errands for Dave, but mostly he hangs out with Eric Taylor, doing whatever Eric is about. Lately that has meant splitting logs from some of the trees that came down in the storm. The wood is sold for firewood to bring in a little extra cash. In Wisconsin, campers have to buy firewood locally, because it you bring it from home, you may inadvertently be transporting harmful insects or other invasive species. Eric, by the way, is the son of volunteers Don and Karen Taylor. He is in his early twenties, which makes him seem pretty young to those of us who are geezers at the R&GN.

I am not sure if Matt is our youngest volunteer, but I think so. We have to be careful about what he does, in fact, because he would do just about anything and we could (seriously) get in trouble for violating child labor laws.

He heads back to school in another week, but he will continue coming up with his folks on weekends as long as weather permits us to keep going. He's a good example that it is never too soon to start volunteering for something worthwhile.