Diane Goebel knows that local senior citizens often have unsatisfied hunger.
It may be a literal hunger, for quality hot meals that they are too frail to make for themselves.
But the hunger can just as easily be figurative.
She has spent years trying to fill both.
"I dearly loved it because I made so many sweet friends," Goebel said of her stint as a
volunteer delivery person for the Home Delivered Meal Program run by the Wood County Committee on Aging.

"I took some of them under my wing," she said of certain seniors on the meal routes that she
drove multiple times a week.
One woman in particular became very dear. "I took her out to the cemetery to visit her husband’s
grave," something the woman never got to do. "We’d sit out there and she’d talk to him and do
her thing, and when she was ready we’d go. It was heart-warming."
Goebel took on the volunteer duties right after she retired in 2002 as a deputy clerk with the Wood
County Common Pleas Court, and continued through 2004, stopping only "because my grandkids came
along" and she became their daycare provider.
While volunteering for the meal program "I had three routes a week, so I kept busy. Mom and Dad did
it like that, too."
Her parents, former Wood County Sheriff Earl "Red" and Palma Rife, set a powerful example of
the value of volunteerism in retirement.
"Dad got out of office in 1972" and later served as County Common Pleas Clerk of Courts and
then U.S. Marshal of the northern district of Ohio, which had him driving to Cleveland three days a
week.
It was shortly after his term as sheriff, from 1960-1972, that the couple began driving their first
meal-delivery route in Bowling Green. "They did it together. They did everything together."

Coming full circle, the Rifes eventually became home-delivered meal clients themselves, as they got older
and more infirm, so Goebel knows the program intimately from both sides.
"They just needed some extra help," she said, explaining why they signed up. "I couldn’t
feed them every day."
Each delivery includes a balanced hot dinner, but there is also "a bag that comes with fruit and a
dessert, and he loved that part," she said of her father.
"Lots of times it would be a friend delivering it, so that’s a chance for a little
socialization."
Plus there was the comfort of knowing they were being checked on at least once a day, in person, in case
someone fell or had another accident.
Today, the Rifes both reside at Bowling Green Manor, where Palma, 89, is dealing with Alzheimer’s disease
and Earl, 91, is receiving physical therapy to strengthen his legs.
The senior centers’ home-delivered meal program is popular across Wood County, with over 7,500 meals a
month currently being served to people on a donation basis.
Many folks don’t initially realize the service can become much more than simple meal delivery, depending
upon the relationship formed between driver and client.
"My father-in-law Gus Goebel, who passed a year ago, he also got meals delivered. His health wasn’t
good at all" as he coped with bad eyesight and failing kidneys.
"One day some of the volunteers came and cleaned up the plants on his porch, and he was just tickled
with that. And people bring cookies. They get to know you! It’s like extended family."
Diane Goebel discovered how little effort it took on her part to make a big difference.
"Little things like picking up the paper for somebody. ‘Can you pick up the mail for me?’ they’d
ask. Little things we take for granted."
Sometimes she also took "her" seniors grocery shopping. The woman she drove on cemetery visits
also enjoyed the supermarket outings where she’d "talk to everybody, and say ‘This is my
friend,’" pointing to Diane. "They do appreciate it so."
"Their smiles make it all worthwhile. If you’re having a bad day, it does your heart good!"
When her parents moved into the nursing home Goebel thought she’d have a little more free time so she
started in with a new volunteer venture last August, this time the Wheeled Meals program at Wood County
Hospital. She packs bulk food baskets for the week for their meal-delivery clients.
Goebel, a 1965 Bowling Green High School graduate, and her husband Rodney, a retired Wood County jail
administrator, may be nearing their own "golden years," but volunteerism has become a second
career of sorts.
"I think I missed my calling in being a nurse or something," she said of the vast enjoyment
she’s found in serving seniors, "but everything falls in place the way it’s supposed to."