BY ABBY FOX

A handful of volunteers with the town’s senior services, who are also life-long East Greenwich citizens, sat down for an hour last week at Swift Gym to talk about why they want a senior / community center there, which is up for a public vote on Nov. 4. The bond passing would mean a lot to them, they said, because they grew up using Swift Gym, as students at East Greenwich Academy, and now, as aging adults, they’ll be able to have it again.

“We’ll be happy to have everything on one floor,” Joyce Coleman said. “There’s a lot of stair-climbing at St. Luke’s and a lot of elderly people aren’t into stair climbing.” (The town’s senior program rents space from St. Luke’s Church for the daily lunch and other activities.) There’s a lift, but it’s scary to ride in. We really do need one level.” She graduated from the East Greenwich Academy in 1953.

 “When we do dances, we’ve had to have it catered, but we’ll be able to provide meals ourselves, when we have our own kitchen,” her husband George Coleman, said. Not only having a new kitchen would be nice, he said, but “the rest of the building can be used, while lunch is going on.”

Coleman, who graduated in 1952, remembers that Swift Gym and the Academy “was just a gorgeous place.

“We have a heartfelt attitude because we were here. We love the place,” he said. “We’d really like to keep it.”

He said, “St. Luke’s is very good to us…”

But, Mary Ann Drake cut in, “It’s not the same as having your own home.”

Drake said, “The programs have been increasing and we need room to put them and this is really the perfect building.”

Indeed, the lunch program, as one example, has grown: from 200 meals a month in 2004, to 330 the next year, to 430 by 2006, to 500 a month in 2008.

And attendance at meals will only increase once food is served in their own building, she said.

“It’s important you can have other things going on at the same time,” she said, so seniors could start the day with a class, move into the kitchen for lunch and then go for something else in the afternoon.

A graduate of the 1955 class, “We’ve been trying for so many years to get a building.”

“We need it, we’ve waited a long time,” said Cookson, a 1947 graduate. “We want a place of our own.”

Like the others who grew up in East Greenwich, went to the Academy and still live here, “We never left town,” she said. “And we’re never leaving.”

Erin McAndrew, director of senior services, said the senior services program has attracted 300 members and 60 volunteers, with 130 seniors listed on the lunch roster.