The folks at the Cross Community Coalition in Swansea are throwing a party for Lorraine Granado tonight, and if you don’t know who Lorraine is, sit tight. It’s her retirement celebration, although she officially left in December.
“I kind of just wanted to fade away, but they won’t let me,” she says, laughing. That’s the first thing I notice about Lorraine: how much she laughs.
She is 61 now, too young to retire, which is part of this story. Were it up to her, she would still be working at the nonprofit she founded and then guided for more than 20 years. Were it up to her, she would not be home reading or taking walks or, of late, watching Wimbledon, though she does love watching Wimbledon and only just manages to tear herself away so I can write about her.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she tells me, which means, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
She doesn’t like a fuss.
That’s the second thing I learn about Lorraine. I hear it from the people who know her, who write me and call her a saint. For all she has done for her neighborhood, for Denver and Colorado, it has never been about her. She earned $44,000 as executive director of the CCC. She lives in a small house in Swansea, right around the corner from her 81-year-old mother. She is a person without pretense.
Ask her about her many awards, show her a copy of the tribute by Rep. Diana DeGette in 2000 that is now part of the Congressional Record, point out her long list of accomplishments — Colorado Women’s Lobby, the Elyria/Swansea Economic Development Corp., the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Colorado People’s Environmental and Economic Network, to name a few — and she will say, “I did a lot of stuff.”
Then she’ll laugh again. “I had a lot of fun. This has been joyful for me.”
A person like this doesn’t retire. Their work is not simply work. It is part of who they are. I tell this to Lorraine’s son, Paul Garcia, the CCC’s assistant director, and he says: “I’ll be honest with you. It’s not a retirement she chose. She’s had some health issues.”
Lorraine knows her community backward and forward. She can tell you its unique history and the history it shares with other poor communities, places run through by freeways and railroads, the neighborhoods of heavy industry, of factories that poison the ground and vent foul- smelling air.
Whenever an issue of environmental contamination or pollution arose, Lorraine was there, organizing her neighbors. “I don’t get angry,” she says. “Anger doesn’t help anything. I just go, ‘No way you’re putting that here, Joe.’ ”
But a year ago, she regularly started forgetting the names of friends and co-workers. She found herself having to write reminders to herself on little sticky notes. She couldn’t read her newspaper because the words and their meaning would vanish from one paragraph to the next.
One day, she got lost on the eight- block trip from work to home.
“That’s when I knew it was done,” she says. “I don’t play games with myself. What’s real is real.”
Only her short-term memory seems to be affected. She’s had numerous medical tests, and doctors tell her they do not know what’s causing her memory loss. It frustrates her. “This is a woman who sees a problem, fixes it and moves on to the next problem,” Paul says.
Still, she’ll joke, “I forget stuff, but I’m not demented.”
The Cross Community Coalition is always busy. People come in all day for parenting and ESL and computer classes. It offers after-school care, youth camp, job services, mental- health counseling, emergency assistance.
Paul says his mom’s vision has always been to give people the tools to improve their lives and to offer those tools for free.
“She was a single mom who raised three boys, and there were times we struggled,” Paul says. “But it solidified her desire to help people, and it strengthened her belief that people must be treated with dignity.”
She says: “If a person speaks only Spanish, well, that’s going to limit their opportunities here, so let’s teach them English. If a person never graduated from high school, they probably won’t be able to get a job with decent pay, so offer GED classes, and when they are done with those, help them with a job search. It’s always been about, ‘Sure, you can do it.’ And here’s the thing: When people know you believe in them, they start to believe in themselves.”
She misses the office hubbub and says she’s “gotta figure out something to do now.” She says she feels her short-term memory has improved since she no longer has the stress of running a nonprofit.
At 6 a.m. every day, she sits at her kitchen table and opens her paper. Sometimes she has to go over a paragraph a few times, and it takes her a long time, but she’s reading again.
And that’s something else I learned about Lorraine Granado: She never gives up.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
