Helping those in need

Step by step

Anne Danahy

BOALSBURG — Gert Aron has his favorites among the many staircases and ramps he has created during the years, including one that almost didn't get built.

“I said it’s too much work,” the 80-year-old retired professor said.

The challenge was a hillside that rolls from the roadway to the front door of a home 60 feet away. Aron’s hesitation gave way and, with help from other volunteers, he designed and built a walkway and 32 steps that are deep enough that Richard Roland, 80, can walk up and down them with ease.

“I told them it looks like a boardwalk in Atlantic City,” said Roland, who uses a cane. He was having a hard time keeping his balance on the grassy hill in front of his Purdue Mountain house.

The project is one in a long list of ramps and staircases Aron has been custom designing and installing for free during the past decade. Some recipients, like Roland, can pay for the lumber. Others cannot. It doesn’t matter. Aron’s time is free, and he works through Habitat for Humanity and with other volunteers and organizations to come up with the wood and building materials.

“In almost every case, people couldn’t afford a professional to build it,” said Aron, a retired Penn State professor of civil engineering and hydrology.

Christian Organization for Repair Projects and Services, or CORPS, has been helping Aron, who relies on a cane, with the physical labor on larger projects for the past few years.

“He calls me when he gets a bigger ramp, and then we help Gert pull the project off,” said Jim Wagner, co-chairman of CORPS.

The group is part of the Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church and helps older people and others with repair jobs they can’t do themselves.

The need, Wagner said, is there, if not always seen by those who are more blessed.

Wagner said volunteers from the church spend a few weeks on projects in Appalachia each summer. One year, Wagner and another volunteer got talking on the trip back about the need for that type of help in Centre County. The projects in Appalachia are good, Wagner said, but they mean spending a day and a half driving each way.

Why not spend the time working at home where such help is also needed, he wondered.

“There’s a lot of people here in Centre County who could use the help,” Wagner said.

Escaping Nazi Germany

The first ramp that Aron built was for his physically disabled granddaughter. But his propensity for building projects started decades before that.

Aron was born in Konigsberg, and he and his family fled Germany in 1939 and moved to Ecuador to escape the Nazis and their boycott of Jewish business people, including Aron’s father. Ecuador, Aron said, was one of the few countries where they could go. His family lived and farmed in the rain forest for almost a decade before moving to the city. Aron and his father, Werner Aron, recount the story in a self-published book “Halo of the Jungle.”

“In Ecuador, we learned to work with our hands and do carpentry by ourselves,” said Aron.

He said he had thought he would become a bridge builder, but a professor at Ohio State University got him interested in hydrology.

Love of bridge building

But a career in hydrology didn’t stop him from dipping his hand into bridge building. Over the years, he’s built and helped build many local bridges, including the Bicentennial Covered Bridge in Spring Creek park in Houserville and the one on the Pennsylvania Military Museum grounds in Boalsburg.

“In 1976, I was a bridge widow all summer,” said Aron’s wife, Jean.

Aron retired in 1991 and did some teaching and consulting after that but had extra time on his hands. He volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, but climbing roofs had lost its appeal.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to do that anymore. I’ll do small repairs,’ ” Aron said.

Ramps and stairways followed, with referrals first coming in from churches, and friends such as Cliff Warner helping out.

In busy years, Aron might build as many as 20 ramps and staircases.

He typically spends a day or two taking measurements, designing the work and pre-cutting the wood. In the case of stairs, he makes the steps with a very low rise, so someone using a cane or walker will have an easier time walking up and down them. Ramps can’t be too steep either.

One of his earlier projects was a 12-foot long staircase with wide steps for a man who had been in a severe car accident and couldn’t leave the nursing home until he had a way to get in and out of his house. The steps were too high and slim and couldn’t be navigated with a walker.

For another project, he and a team started with lifting a 400-pound wooden deck that had been moved to a mobile home and was about 2 feet too low for it. The project grew to include a sun room on the side of the home over an extended basement area.

The woman had asked Aron’s team whether anything could be done with the plywood covering over that area.

“Jean said with the sun orientation, you could make a sun room that would be ideal,” Gert Aron said.

Earlier this year, Aron designed a staircase leading to the mobile home of an older Centre County couple living on a fixed income.

Richard Roland’s daughter, Sheryl, said Aron, “the old gentleman,” kept an eye on the younger volunteers who helped with that project.

“Every step is 4 inches high, and we came out exactly right,” Aron said. “That’s our masterpiece.”

Anne Danahy can be reached at 231-4648.