Troop 298 Scouts Clean Up Home for Senior Sisters

A group of six New Hyde Park boy scouts from Troop 298 recently took the time to help two elderly sisters who were having trouble caring for their property on North 10th Street after a neighbor alerted the village to deteriorating conditions.

“Because the women are so elderly, they weren’t able to properly care for it,” New Hyde Park Deputy Mayor Lawrence Montreuil said during the Sept. 17 meeting of the village board at the village hall.

A resident had passed along information about the house at a prior board meeting to Montreuil.

“I stopped by the house and was happy to see that the women who lived there were doing fine, but they were no longer able to keep up with the gardening due to their advanced age,” Montreuil said in an e-mail. “Obviously, sending the building department over to fine them for property maintenance violations wasn’t the answer.”

Montreuil brought the situation to the attention of Richard Pallisco, chairman of the village’s beautification committee and an assistant scoutmaster with the troop, who went and over the course of two to three hours on Sept. 15 had cleaned up property and also dismantled and disposed of an old fence on the property at 4 North 10th St.

“They needed hours for community service so this was a perfect thing for them to do,” Pallisco said of the scouts. Scouts must complete at least 12 hours of community service for troop requirements.

The 40x 100 lot had weeds that were waist high in both the front and backyard, trees that were in need of pruning because they were touching the house, and a 100-ft. wooden stockade fence that had fallen down and needed to be bundled up for disposal.

“The whole thing just fell (over) and the weeds grew above it,” Pallisco said. “I couldn’t run my lawnmower over that because you’d kill the blades.”

Pallisco said that he had informed informed sisters Ruth and Jean Keck, who are both about 90 years of age, a few days before that the scouts would be arriving “and they were never so happy.”

The scouts had brought with them a pickup truck, weed-whackers, lawnmowers and rakes and managed to fill up 12 garbage bags with clippings and debris.

“The kids love powertools,” Pallisco smiled, “and the kids felt really good about themselves doing that. It’s just one of those bad stories where there’s no family and they didn’t have any money.”

Pallisco also left a contact number for the women, asking them to give them a call when they needed snow shoveled.

Get New Hyde Park news on Facebook