The Give-Back Years

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How about the volunteer project she began in 1957 and still runs today: her Foreign Language Interpreters' List--a directory of 200 Charlestonians who read, write and speak 53 foreign languages and who provide emergency translation services free of charge to hospitals, police and schools?

"Ah, with that particular one, she's a real star," says Edwards.

If you live in Charleston, S.C., Margot Strauss Freudenberg, 91, is no less a legend than Fort Sumpter or Rainbow Row, though she arrived in Charleston in 1940, a humble immigrant from Hannover, Germany. Trained as a physical therapist, she established a private practice and worked at clinics and hospitals. In 1957 at the city's Roper Hospital, a doctor on rounds couldn't communicate with a critically ill Dutch sailor and enlisted her as a translator. The sailor didn't understand Freudenberg's German any better than he did the doctor's English. Alarmed by the incident, Freudenberg went on local radio and television and appealed for help. A Dutchman working in town responded. With his help, the illness was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, and the sailor was flown back to Holland.

"The thought that foreigners could possibly die in a hospital here because of a language barrier haunted me," she recalls. Within a few months she had produced her first translators' list. Often consulted, it is now published on the Internet. "Thousands of people have been assisted by the list since its inception," estimates Barbara Vaughn, public information director for Charleston. Translators have helped Cuban boat people stranded in port, sick Mexican migrant workers who couldn't communicate with hospital staff, Vietnamese schoolkids who couldn't understand instructions and a Norwegian sailor who ran away from a hospital, scared that his ship would leave without him.

The service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and, it seems to Freudenberg, her calls "always come at midnight." (Generally a police car picks her up and takes her where she is needed.) She updates the list every 18 months, finding translators on her walks in town as readily as she does phoning area schools. In 1959 she told Charleston's News and Courier: "I have got so much satisfaction and happiness by trying to help people in distress. This is my repaying of my debt [to America]."

ACE OF HEARTS A retired judge creates a volunteer force for seniors

Residents of Sacramento County, Calif., are likely to have heard of ACE (Aide Corps for the Elderly). It recruits and deploys volunteers to work with 35 public and private agencies that serve the frail elderly residents of the county. There are ACE public service spots on radio and TV, ads and articles in community newspapers and ACE open houses; its recruitment tables in shopping malls and community centers are piled high with red, white and blue ACE pamphlets listing some of the good works its volunteers perform. People respond. Most, however, are looking for help, not offering it.

The supply-demand imbalance is testimony to the dire need ACE was created to meet. Its volunteer force of 110 must cope with an age 85-plus population that at last count totaled 18,541--a 92% surge since 1990. It is also testimony to the vision of ACE's founder, Leonard M. Friedman, 84, a former attorney and a retired associate justice of the California court of appeal.