Marilyn Daily-Blair: Creating Community with Creativity & Love

Candy Puterbaugh

 

Marilyn Daily-Blair’s love of seniors is lifelong. Growing up she spent summers with her grandparents and “was always attracted to the grandmas in the neighborhood.” At 14 she briefly was a caregiver for a woman — her first professional work with the elderly.

 

“I loved living with Anna — cooking, cleaning, and hearing her beautiful stories,” Marilyn says. “She’d been a rancher’s daughter and horsewoman but wore lace gloves to church! Anna taught me I could be anything I wanted to be. I named my first daughter after her.”

 

After briefly studying musical theater then directing a senior center in The Dalles, in 1999, Marilyn became director of Center 50+ in Salem — at that time on the city’s closure list. With her at the helm, the center began growing in leaps and bounds — in 2008 acquiring a new building.

 

Today the thriving, volunteer-run nonprofit serves 15,000 patrons, with daily visits of up to 1,000. It was the first senior center in Oregon to become nationally accredited, and last year earned the “Modernizing Senior Centers” Award from the National Council on Aging.

Marilyn’s theatre experience shows in her work. “I was always a dancer and singer, and at church I used to sing out over everyone! I’ve recruited my center staff to sing and dance, which we do all the time.”

 

Coordinating many events is a creative outlet and, Marilyn says, “The seniors love seeing us have fun. They’re our friends. We don’t push or pull them but walk alongside them.” Seven staff members and 500 volunteers do the same. It’s a winning philosophy: the center’s average patron age, once 84, is now in the mid-60s.

 

“Before 2020 the emphasis was on what we did inside,” Marilyn says. “Now our mission is helping older adults commit to each other and the community — like with our mobile senior meal program. We go where people live. It’s not about a building but a philosophy of living the best life at any age in a place where they feel comfortable. Center 50+ is one of those places.”

The center offers more than 200 programs and services, including a fitness center, retirement planning, artisan shops, and classes.

Bonnie Katich, the lifelong learning coordinator, oversees classes including music, art, sewing,wood shop, personal enrichment, history, and computer technology.

 

“Marilyn has developed such an amazing lifelong learning program that allows us to think outside the box,” Bonnie says. “Our classes help patrons celebrate what they’ve come through, to reflect on an era and memories. Many can’t wait for the class list each fall.”

 

Bonnie says Marilyn works less often in the office than “right there with students and teachers and our team — and Bingo players — celebrating what they do.”

 

Patron, volunteer, and board member Louanne Watson says, “Marilyn makes everyone feel like they fit in. Our center has a feeling of home.”

 

 

Outside of work, the mother of four likes camping and hiking with her husband and being “Mimi” to their two grandchildren. She says some day she might dust off her dance shoes or sing in her church choir.

 

“I’ve had the best job ever,” she says. “I’ve been blessed by the people surrounding me. In my life thousands have shaped me to be a different employee or parent or director.

 

I hope to see people embrace aging as something awesome rather than to be avoided. We’re all in denial about getting older. I want to take the fear out of natural changes so we can all be the best version of ourselves at each age.”

 

Candy Puterbaugh is a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, groan-inducing punster, writer, competitive runner, pet lover, and tender of gardens.