WorkZone: Westinghouse retiree group serves up connections — and food for the hungry

Feb. 20--Bob Seidelson's most rewarding job began when his career ended.

Each weekday morning around 10 a.m., Mr. Seidelson can be found loading plastic food trays onto a cart outside Forbes Regional Hospital's kitchen, where he coordinates the Meals On Wheels program for about 50 Monroeville residents.

"It's a good one today," he said on a recent Tuesday in February, peeking under the lid. "Chicken. Mashed potatoes. Some fresh carrots."

He would repeat the same sentence to 14 clients that day. Each pays $5 for two meals, one hot and one cold, and that's how the program is funded. That and an annual grant from a Westinghouse retirees' organization, Service Uniting Retired Employees, or SURE for short.

A retired financial executive who spent 20 years with Westinghouse Electric Co. and another 15 after "they sold me" to ABB, Mr. Seidelson became a SURE member four years ago. Another Westinghouse alum had nudged him to come to one of the organization's monthly meetings.

It was an organization of volunteers, his friend said, and Mr. Seidelson was already doing the volunteer work. Why not share that with the Westinghouse family?

So he did, and now the time he spends delivering lunches to seniors counts toward the 50,000 volunteer hours reported by SURE's membership last year.

The 960-member organization is funded entirely through member dues and donations. Dues are $20 a year, but the most common denomination that comes in is $50, which just overwhelms the organization's new president, Lucio Facchini.

Mr. Facchini spent 37 years in Westinghouse's power business and even though he's been retired since 2000, he feels the strong pull of the Westinghouse community. He goes on trips with fellow Westinghouse retirees -- last year's trip to New York was his first. He plays golf with them. He attends a monthly Westinghouse lunch club.

"You see people you know," said Vaughn Gilbert, who retired from public relations at Westinghouse a few years ago.

"You get to know them better," added Dallas Frey, a former Westinghouse human resources executive.

SURE started 25 years ago, at a time when it was much more common for people to spend an entire career at one company -- especially if that company was Westinghouse.

When Mr. Seidelson started working there in the 1970s, all of East Pittsburgh was settled with employees.

Employees' children went to the same schools. They met at church, at the grocery store. People's work and personal networks became linked for generations.

"It was everything to everybody then," he said.

Staying relevant

More than 100 years after Westinghouse's founder and namesake left the world, his aura still hovers. Some Westinghouse employees and retirees talk about him as if he were their boss, as if many decades later, he still sets the tone.

Mr. Westinghouse invented the weekend, Mr. Gilbert said, and gave employees life insurance.

"He made sure the toilets were spick-and-span, that the water was crystal clean," he said.

The inventor's storied decency and his care for employees explains why 50,000 of them put in $2.5 million of their own money in 1930 to build a memorial to him in Schenley Park and why the SURE organization was involved in the effort to rehab that memorial last year.

But a member organization can't just look to the past for relevance, Mr. Gilbert said. To retain current members, SURE has monthly financial roundtables, tackling topics like investing, tax preparation and Medicare. It organizes trips and tours for members and spouses.

"I have looked into the demographics," Mr. Gilbert said. "We've got people from 58 into the triple digits."

The challenge is recruiting new members.

In recent years, the organization has offered complimentary one-year membership for newcomers. ("If Westinghouse people value anything, it's stuff for free," Mr. Gilbert said.)

While SURE isn't affiliated with Westinghouse Electric Co. it has an arrangement with the company that retirees get a pamphlet about the organization in their retirement packet.

"There's a feeling of, 'hey, you're not working here anymore so let's keep hanging out,'" Mr. Gilbert said.

SURE has always supported the organizations that its members volunteer for, but a few years ago, it started a more focused Feed the Hungry effort, in which it sponsors a dozen and a half Meals On Wheels programs across the region.

Mr. Seidelson's is among them. Last year, SURE's donation and some others helped Mr. Seidelson be able to give all of his clients free meals for the entire month of December.

"Merry Christmas," he told them. Some nearly cried.

Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.

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