Bea Carlson, second from left, a longtime Lawrence Memorial Hospital Auxiliary gift shop volunteer, receives an Elizabeth Watkins Community Caring Award from the LMH Endowment Association on Jan. 23. From left, gift shop manager Jennifer Conroy, Bea, LMH director of volunteers Allyson Leland and Ann Marie Boncella, a gift shop assistant, celebrate the occasion.

For decades, Bea Carlson has been a helping hand for several days a week at Lawrence Memorial Hospital’s gift shop.

Carlson moved to Lawrence from Cambridge, Mass., in 1963 with her husband, Robert, who is a longtime Kansas University chemistry professor.

About 30 years ago, Carlson started volunteering with the LMH Auxiliary, which today has about 350 volunteers who help hospital staff and patients. Carlson’s duties have included running the gift shop. Carlson’s mother, Martha Rohrbough, volunteered with her for about eight years.

“Bea does a lot of things above and beyond,” said Allyson Leland, LMH’s director of volunteer services for 16 years.

Carlson’s experience around the shop helps in many ways, Leland said.

Recently, Carlson was recognized as one of two individual winners of the first Elizabeth Watkins Community Caring Awards given by the LMH Endowment Association.

“(Carlson) is a doer. She gets things done, and she is the best,” said Jennifer Conroy, the gift shop’s manager, before introducing Carlson at the awards ceremony.

The endowment association is helping raise $8 million toward funding a $40 million hospital renovation, and LMH Auxiliary has pledged $300,000 toward the effort, given in $50,000 increments per year.

By April, the auxiliary will have donated $150,000, Leland said. The auxiliary consistently donates money from the gift shop operation back to the hospital, typically to buy beds and new equipment.

The other individual Watkins award winner was Janette McCullough, who will be featured in a future “Do You Know?” story.

Explain what you do as an auxiliary volunteer.

Bea Carlson: I’ve basically been in the gift shop, so we see a lot of patients and a lot of visitors. It’s kind of an oasis, kind of a relaxing oasis for both. Yes, I’ve totally enjoyed it, and all of the employees I’ve worked with are very supportive of the volunteers.

How did you originally get started volunteering?

That’s a good question. It was so long ago. The hospital has given so much to my family. My in-laws moved here, and then my mother and father moved here, and my aunt moved here. And so they’ve all come up and went through good health and bad, so we’ve used the hospital many times.

So to me, it’s just kind of giving a little back of what was given to us.

Explain how you see the basic duties of the auxiliary volunteers and how you try to lift people’s spirits around the hospital in the gift shop or other places.

I think we try to. A lot of the patients and visitors just come in to kill time. And it’s just to help them out and make them feel comfortable or help them if they have a gift they have to get. For employees it’s kind of for “R and R,” just time to come in. They don’t have the duties surrounding them.

I think we try to help patients and visitors feel as though they are cared about.

What is the biggest change you have seen since starting in the gift shop?

Probably in (the mid-1990s) when we moved into the big shop we have today. The one before it was not quite a cubbyhole. It’s grown from a very small income to a very large business, actually.

Had you expected to win the award a few weeks ago?

It was a total surprise – a very good surprise. I was very honored. This is a new award this year, and I was honored for myself and honored for the auxiliary.

You won a Vision Award in 2001 also from LMH, so you’ve received some hardware out of your years of service. Did you start out 30 years ago hoping to win awards?

No, I didn’t even know awards existed. I’m very honored to get them, but even if I didn’t get them, I’d still be doing what I’m doing.

– If you know someone who should be featured in the “Do You Know?” column, contact staff writer George Diepenbrock at 832-7144.