Lessons learned from a generation of giving

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Olha Dunbar

Born on Feb. 14, 1931, Don Ellis grew up learning that the only way to get ahead was by helping your neighbor. Ellis, a longtime Holly resident, is instrumental in the assistance he offers to those renting plots at Holly’s Heritage Farmstead Community Garden on N. Holly Road. Eighty years young, Ellis is still going strong.

One of the many interesting things about Ellis’ help at the Community Garden is the fact that he himself doesn’t have a plot – he is just there helping others tend to their plants, offering wisdom and advice as to the best way to manage it.

That knowledge didn’t come to him by casual means, but by learning lifesaving techniques from his parents that saved the family from starvation.

Some of Ellis’ fondest memories revolve around how his father taught him at a very young age the art of tending a garden.

Originally from Murray, Kentucky, the Ellis family relocated to Holly in the summer of 1930. Employment in the south, as in many areas of the country, was scarce. The senior Ellis transplanted his young family in the hopes of finding work at the General Motors plant in Flint only to discover deplorable working conditions and the unsteadiness of work and pay that workers typically faced. Eventually, the workers had enough, and united toward a common cause – the “Flint Sit-Down Strike” of 1936.  

United Auto Workers union members gathered together inside the plants to demand better pay and better working conditions. While history shows the frightening and tragic events that unfolded, Ellis recalls that as a young boy, he would go with his father to the plant to feed the striking workers.

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Don Ellis

Risking physical harm, the elder Ellis wanted to support his fellow strikers. “The men were desperate during the strike,” Ellis said. “It was violent between the strikers and the police, the strikers had no means to support themselves, and Dad took a chance by going there to feed them,” he added.  “The police were reluctant to come against the strikers – they were all from the same home town – so that’s how I learned the importance of working together, and the importance of gardening.”

Gardening for the Ellis family was a way of life. Without the garden or his mother’s expertise in canning vegetables, Ellis said his family would not have had enough to eat during the winter. “Many people were desperate, hungry, jobless and homeless,” Ellis said. “Some would even come to our front door and ask for something to eat – my mother would always prepare a sandwich with whatever we had and give it to them.”

It was around that time that the federal government began the Victory Garden program throughout the country, turning vacant fields into gardens to be harvested to help feed soldiers during World War II.

The importance of a community garden today shares in the spirit of giving and sharing food, friendships, and assistance to one another for the success of the garden.

“You fit in when you see people need help – and they will help you when you need it,” Ellis said. “It wasn’t called volunteering then – it was just help – the kind of help that saved lives and gave support because so many were in need.”

When Ellis isn’t helping out around the garden or the church, he can be found doing other physical activities including biking, walking, or riding his motorcycle. In the winter, you will find him skiing or snowboarding on the slopes of Mt. Holly. Over the last 36 years, Ellis has volunteered his time to Mt. Holly’s National Ski Patrol.

For Ellis and many others of his generation, helping people and working together toward the greater good is just part of life. It’s that selfless kind of giving that supported many during extraordinary times, and the kind of giving that is sorely needed today. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. If members of today’s generation took a page out of Ellis’ book, it might just be what we need to change our current economic condition as we struggle to gain ground from the “Great Recession.”