Chore Service: 25 years of helping hands

Last year, The Chore Service hosted its summertime silent and live auction festivities in antiques dealer and interior designer Michael Trapp’s East meets West inspired garden in Sharon, and it didn’t just rain — it poured. Yet the party went on, gin-and-tonics, Gucci slippers and plenty of varicolored umbrellas slick with drops. 

Many quipped that all one would have to do to add a splash of water to a whiskey was hold the glass outside the tent. 

It would seem, as a reward, that 2016’s showers brought 2017’s flowers. Hosted this year at Elaine LaRoche’s Lion Rock Farm, the weather couldn’t have been more enticing on Saturday afternoon, July 29.

Under a large white tent set softly aglow by dipping strings of lights, guests in bright pastel hues shuffled to the sprinkling upbeat chords of the live piano performance. 

Beyond the perfect weather, this year’s 25th Anniversary Party ushered in new technological advances (to Sharon, that is). The silent auction was all digital, using BidPal to place e-bids; iPad-carrying helpers moved around the party to assist as needed. 

The live auction was decidedly old-fashioned. The auction items were characteristically too good to resist and generously donated. They included a Black Arkansas apple tree donated by Debby and Bruce Bennett, a private tour of six local gardens donated by Douglas Dockery Thomas complete with a luncheon hosted by Lea Davies and Larry Power, one hundred daffodils to be planted by Consolini and Tonan Landscape Design in Norfolk, premium house tickets to Broadway for the revival of “Miss Saigon” with dinner at the Gotham Bar and Grill in Greenwich Village. Perhaps most alluring: a one-week stay at Mas d’Arcs, a 19th-century stone farmhouse in the South of France. 

After some initial reticence, bidders took to using BidPal,  Priscilla McCord said as the garden party came to a close. 

“We thought we should look to the future; everything’s technology based now,” said Lea Davies, president of Chore’s board of directors. “Of course, what’s also exciting is that it’s been 25 years since Ella Clark started Chore Service and we’re still in business. We started helping two families, now it’s 200, and we employ more than 40 people in the area, which is amazing. It’s a great model Ella built. You help the elderly stay in their houses, you employ people and those people invest their money back into the community. Plus the donors today matched the challenge grant to raise $25,000. We have no idea what Washington and the federal budget will do to us, so it was amazing that people stepped up and were so generous.”

“It was heart-warming, this is an incredible community we live in,” added McCord. “We’re so out-of-our-minds grateful.”