I first met John Zon many years ago when we moved into our house on James Street. He was one of the first people to welcome this young family with young children into the neighborhood. John Zon was a fierce and consistent advocate for seniors in Greenfield as former Selectmen Peter Ruggeri, John Merrigan, and Tim Farrell; former state Rep. Bill Benson and elder advocate Al Norman can confirm. John also loved his Greenfield community, serving on the Council on Aging and the Franklin County Technical School Committee for many years. During those years he was a tireless advocate for making sure seniors could get out of the basement of the Weldon Hotel and into a new, larger senior center that could grow with the growing number of seniors in Greenfield. Sadly he died before seeing the beautiful new senior center that bears his name.
I’m confident that the last thing John Zon would want is for his beloved community to be arguing over who gets to use the center. He was a no-nonsense, forthright man who believed in common sense solutions. While I suspect that he would prefer it to be called a senior center, above all he would want us all to work together to resolve the issue.
The idea of building a new senior center for seniors did not spring up out of nowhere. Similar to having a new library, building a new senior center had been talked about for years, but kept getting pushed to the back burner. There is history here, and there is a long established relationship between the Council on Aging and the city, which Ginger Carson lays out well in her My Turn, “We Are a Senior Center with a Confusing Name.” She explains some of issues that the Council on Aging faces when trying to accommodate a senior center as a community center.
Let’s work this out the John Zon way: agree on common sense solutions, including a facility-use policy for the building that allows it to be a shared space, and give it its proper funding.
Roxann Wedegartner
Greenfield
[Editor’s note: Roxann Wedegartner is a candidate for Greenfield mayor.]