A father-daughter team builds homes in North Carolina
Henry Eddy is 80 years old and has worked on all but three of the more than 100 houses built by his local Habitat affiliate in North Carolina. Our Towns Habitat for Humanity has named a subdivision--Eddy Place--after their tireless volunteer. Henry still works two or three days most weeks, saying with a smile in his voice that "that's about all I can handle." He says his work with Habitat keeps him younger. "I feel like you just have to keep going," he says. "I hope to go another five years."
Henry retired in 1988 after 30 years of traveling the Carolinas as a salesman of pipe valves and fittings and plumbing supplies. "I started looking around for something to do," he recalls, "and Habitat seemed to fit just right in there. It was just something that appealed to me. I had never done construction, but I found I enjoyed it."
Henry remembers attending the initial meetings of his affiliate and getting involved right at the outset. It took a little longer for his daughter to follow in his footsteps--just about 12 years, Cathy Fulbright estimates. "It was certainly seeing my dad's involvement," she says. "I became a stay-at-home mom when our oldest son was born, and I would take him up to see Daddy's work site. I wanted to see what was going on, but also you want to make your children aware of opportunities that they might have in the future to help other people."
What was happening, though, was a growing awareness on Cathy's part of what she could do. "I just saw the fellowship that came about," she says. "Not just from the volunteers, but from the homeowners, the neighborhood. They had this incredible camaraderie." So Fulbright began talking to her own neighbors about Habitat. "We decided to pull together and start a monthly work crew," she says. The crew began volunteering about five years ago, usually one Saturday a month. "We did that for three years, and then said, 'Why can't we do more?'" So Cathy and her neighbors decided to take on an Adopt-A-Home project, in which a group raises the money to finance a house and then builds that home in partnership with the family who will ultimately buy it. The house was completed in the summer of 2005.
Work sites became family affairs. "I do remember one Habitat work day," she says. "It happened to be a project where there were some two-story houses, and I was working on sheeting a roof across the street from a house [Dad] was putting siding on."
"I didn't get anything done all morning," Henry says, "watching her up there."
"He didn't," Cathy recalls. "He sat there, saying, 'Don't get too close to that edge.' It was always nice to have someone looking out for you. It was always comforting, too, to have somebody who would teach you and be caring. Not that the other project leaders weren't, but this was Dad."
Cathy's children were out of school for the summer when her Adopt-A-Home project was at its peak. "They would help bring lunches and that sort of thing," she says. "I think they see how important Habitat is for folks." They also see their mother and grandfather hard at work. "They think that's incredible," she says. "Especially the fact--as they say--that he still does it."
