By Elissa Ely
If you want to reach Pat Brusch, here’s a recommendation: do not text her. Call on the landline, which is the only phone she will answer. If you decide to email her, there’s no need to type fast. Get a cup of coffee and a good meal, because it may take some time to hear back. “I’m stuck in the 50s,” she explains. “I am a horror with electronics. The non-electronic paper world is my world.” This is someone who cheerfully admits she once contacted the publishers of Computers for Dummies because the book hadn’t explained what “a click” meant.
Yet, volunteering in Belmont for more than four decades, she is also proof that the electronic horror can be an invaluable community gift. Pat has been a Town Meeting member since about 1986, a past president of Friends of Belmont Library Board, past member of League of Women Voters and the Mount Auburn Hospital Auxiliary, past chair of the Warrant Committee, and a member of search committees too numerous to name. There were 18 years of weekly attendance at School Committee meetings, and she remains on the board of the philanthropic Belmont Savings Bank Foundation, the Comprehensive Capital Budget Committee, and the Permanent Building Committee (with other involvements most likely left unnoted because of authorial incompetence). She puts to shame the word “useful.” “Everybody’s devoted to something,” she says. “I’m not an outdoor-sy person. I’m not a hiker. I’m a really good observer and a detail person, and I can be annoying as hell.”
Pat Brusch. Photo courtesy of Pat Brusch
All this began in Gardner, the factory town where she grew up. Pat’s dad was a traditional 8-to-5 worker; the family business was furniture. Outside of work, he volunteered with veteran and civic organizations. Her mother, a home economics major, had a precise eye for measurement: girls got half a cup of rice at dinner, boys three-quarters of a cup. She portioned out her volunteerism as well: one day a week in the library, one day in the hospital, lots of church involvement, and immersion in the “College Club” which raised and awarded annual scholarships for senior high girls. Her parents were examples of the possible.
From the age of preschool, Pat wanted to be a nurse. There were no family relatives in medicine; it was just an inner certainty without explanation. On her parents’ insistence, she went to college instead of directly to nursing school. Afterwards, she rose quickly. Within two years, she was head nurse on her unit at New England Medical Center, and then, supervisor. But administration alone was unacceptable to someone who yearned for direct care. “I wanted to carry the bedpans, I wanted to rub the patient’s back, and comb their hair.” She lasted six months before returning to clinical work in addition to supervising.
For four years, she was a night nurse on the infectious disease floor. This is where she met her husband. She had called the intern in the middle of the night to pronounce a death. “You hated to do it,” she said about waking him, “they were so grumpy.” They married a few years later, and moved to Belmont in 1978, when she was pregnant with her second child. The move was meant to be. After buying their house, she realized that one of her brothers lived 10 doors away.
Volunteering began pragmatically, because babysitters were available during meetings to care for her children. It started with the League of Women Voters. “Sign me up!” she remembers thinking, “I wanted to do something other than diapers and meals, and someone babysitting my kids was solving my problem. If people needed something done, I did it—things no one else wanted to do: ‘Hey, would you like to run the bake sale for the library?’”
She was always a reader. “I read all the time, and I did 50 zillion things for the library.” Among them was helping to computerize the Belmont Library in the mid-80’s when she was president of the Friends of Library Board—the first department in town to be digitized.
Of course, she was also a mother of children in public school. When Winn Brook Elementary was vying for renovation funds with Chenery and Burbank Schools, Pat found a diplomatic strategy. In collaboration with a Burbank parent, she approached the School Committee, suggesting a way the elementary schools could be helped simultaneously. This led to passing the first debt exclusion in town and to parallel renovation projects. “I LOVED tramping around in my boots and hard hat at Burbank and Winn Brook,” she says.
Rebuilding Chenery Middle School followed. Now, as current chair of the Permanent Building Committee, she could tell you a lot about pipes, nails, and regulations. It suits her. “I’m a life-long learner,” she says. “I trained as a nurse, and now I oversee construction projects. A building is a body, and the construction is a healing.”
“I trained as a nurse, and now I oversee construction projects. A building is a body, and the construction is a healing.”
Requests for her involvement grew. Way back in 1990, Pat was asked to be a “corporator” of Belmont Savings Bank, “a sort of eyes and ears ambassador. I was at it for 20 years, and I still can’t tell you what a corporator is.” Then, in 2010, Belmont Savings Bank went public. No longer a sleepy local bank, it began to sell and trade stock. One requirement was the creation of an independent foundation that would donate money to the community.
Pat got a call (on her landline). The new CEO was asking for her resume, “which of course, I didn’t have.” He asked what foundations she belonged to, “which were none.” Still, he wanted her to join as the foundation’s community member.
“It was a whole new world for me, philanthropy,” she says. “Our mission is to be good members of the communities.” Her job, with one ear to the ground, is to vet applicants. “I got to be pretty good at ferreting out red flags.” The foundation has supported a renovation of Joey’s Park, a playground at Butler School, and more recently, multimillion dollar donations to the library and rink.
Though she seems to be everywhere, Pat doesn’t drive anymore. Friends from her volunteer worlds, as well as her neighbors, do. Someone calls from Wilson Farm asking what she needs. Someone brings her to the hospital. Someone asks where she has to go.
A network of volunteers, helping the premier volunteer. This is only right.
Elissa Ely is a community psychiatrist.
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