ANTIGO — Two weeks ago, Tracy Bussey came up with a simple, but big plan: she would cater a free lunch at the Langlade County Senior Center.
The day before the event, however, Bussey, the manager of Farmer’s Home restaurant, realized the number of seniors who had signed up for the meal at the rapidly-expanding Senior Center had grown too large for she and her staff to serve without reinforcements.
To handle all these seniors on such short notice, she knew just who to call.
High school seniors.
Monday afternoon at 11 a.m., the students arrived at the Senior Center fresh from Antigo High School, where they had been let out of class just slightly before their lunch period. There were somewhere north of ten of them. They wore aprons, walked around refilling cups with lemonade or water, and circulated about the tables spread around the room with paper plates piled with pulled pork sandwiches, gravy-slathered mashed potatoes, and green beans.
Asking the twelfth-graders for help wasn’t, in fact, such strange decision by Bussey.
“I’ve known most these kids since they were all little,” she said. “Javon’s gone to kindergarten with most of them, so they’ve been together for 12 years.”
Neither was the meal unfeasible for her. In recent months, after being highlighted by regional and even national news programs for its unique pay-it-forward meals by which down-on-their-luck customers’ meals are paid for anonymously at Farmer’s Home, the restaurant has been flooded with donations. To date, according to Bussey’s parents, the Farmer’s Home owners Julie and Chuck Turney, more than $6,000 has been sent in.
Marie Keto, a waitress at the restaurant, said the types of donations, as well as their sources, have varied widely.
“We’ve had cash donations, we’ve had check donations, we’ve had people calling over the phone with credit cards,” Keto said. “We’ve had them from Maine to Tampa Bay, Fla. to Wyoming. We’ve received lots of cards and letters that are so supportive. Tracy does hang those up on the wall and it’s a beautiful thing to read the great comments that people share. We’ve had some donations coming from some of our elderly people in the name of their spouse that they just lost. It’s something that they can do to kind of help this community.”
Some of the donations have come from local customers as well, including from the family of Senior Center Director Kim McCann. The generosity of their donation, in fact, led Bussey to offer to hold the Senior Center event in the first place.
“Tracy does amazing stuff around here — she really does,” McCann said. “She just has such a big heart. It makes you want to be a better person when you’re around somebody like that. She doesn’t have to do this. She finds the good in everyone.”
Keto is one person who knows that firsthand.
“Tracy took a chance on me,” Keto said. “She had no idea who I was. When I applied for the job back in March, I had a massive black eye, and she still hired me on the spot. She’s always been there for me. My soon-to-be ex-husband was very abusive — I’ve had to call Tracy twice, and both times she was right there to come and get me and my son. That’s why no matter what, Farmer’s Home is going to be my home and my family.”
Keto said she suspects some of the high schoolers working at Monday’s event have a similar affection for Bussey.
“They would do anything for Tracy,” she said. “During this past year, we would do team dinners for the football team, basketball team, volleyball, the hockey team, and we would make them dinners kind of like this. I think because of what Tracy’s done for them, they probably would volunteer for her anyway they can. They’re a great group of kids.”
That last point was one with which none at Monday’s event disagreed. Not only were the students industrious — so energetically did they fulfill their duties that many of the Farmer’s Home employees and regular Senior Center volunteers were often sidelined with nothing to do — after the food had all been served, they grabbed plates of their own and fanned out, sitting at tables and talking with the elder seniors themselves.
Jim Chen, a foreign exchange student from Taiwan, sat next to Ken Kubacki — he knew Kubacki’s granddaughter, and had met him before. Jenna Czerneski sat by her grandmother, Sharon Knight. Unlike their classmates, Lily DeWan and Lucy Slominski didn’t have relatives among those at their table, but talked about them afterwards with a kind of grandparently fondness.
“One woman said to me, ‘Can you tell me what’s going on in the young teenage world?’” laughed DeWan.
“A lot of them were married to farmers,” said Slominski, smiling. “Every woman that I sat by at my table said she was married to a farmer.”
But the girls seemed to gain a kind of intimacy with their tablemates as well.
“One of mine told me that she is originally from Milwaukee, but she lived in Texas and Indiana and Arizona and all these other places and then found herself back here in White Lake because she’s owned a cottage in White Lake since 1970,” DeWan said. “And she’s like, ‘It’s just always felt like home here.’ Her husband passed away a couple years ago, but then she made friends, and she’s happy here. She’s not stuck here, but she wants to be here.”
“It felt like a reciprocal excitement,” Slominski said. “For me to get to talk to somebody who has lived a lot of their life and for them to get to talk to somebody who hasn’t lived a lot of their life yet and talk to them about their aspirations, it felt like that excitement was reciprocated.”
Senior Center members Gloria Edwards and Betty Cross sat with two 12th grade boys about whom they reported similar notions.
“They were nice boys,” Cross said. “You only hear of the bad ones. But there’s lots of them helping in the community, and lots of them I’m sure are helping other places. There’s a lot of nice kids in our district.”
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