http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-06/04/061l-060498-idx. html Seniors Stay Busy Lending A Helping Hand County Honors 5 Volunteers With Achievement Awards By Elissa Leibowitz Special to The Washington Post, June 4, 1998 The stereotype of retirees is often of bored and restless seniors struggling to fill the gap once occupied by family and jobs. Not so for five Montgomery County senior citizens: DONNA DORROS, Charles Pritchard, Vernetta Reynolds, Murray Stein and Bill Tait. All are active volunteers who have been honored by county officials for their zest and contributions to various community activities. Each has been awarded the newly created Path of Achievement Award. Advocacy Award Five years after her husband Sidney's death, people still ask Donna Dorros why she married a man who suffered from Parkinson's disease so advanced that he often sat rigid and immobile in a chair, unable to talk or move. "My answer is always the same: You don't marry a disease, you marry a person," said Dorros, 70. "The Parkinson's was incidental. The 11 1/2 years that we were married were probably the most rewarding years of my life." Dorros and her husband met when the two worked together at the National Education Association. Sidney already had been diagnosed with the disease, at age 36, when Donna Dorros met him. After the two married in 1982, they started a weekly support group for Parkinson's patients that Dorros still runs every Wednesday morning at Covenant United Methodist Church in Montgomery Village. Dorros scans the Internet daily for new information on the disease that she can share with the group's 30 members. And after attending church every Sunday, she rides the bus to the Asbury Methodist Village's Wilson Health Care Center to visit former group members whose diseases have advanced considerably. "When you don't have anything you have to do every day," she said, "it's really important to fill in the spaces with things that are really important and make a difference in life."<snip>... -- Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada [log in to unmask]