A nearly $400,000 project at the Baker City Senior Center, 2810 Cedar St., is adding six private offices.

More than half a century after a group of senior citizens in Baker City started meeting weekly to play cards and share their favorite dishes at potlucks, the social opportunities for a new generation have expanded along with the space to enjoy them.

The bingo, the lunches, the tai chi classes and much more that happens at the Baker City Senior Center at 2810 Cedar St. is a tribute to, and legacy of, those forebears who have passed away, said Mary Jo Carpenter.

She retired in October 2018 after working for 31 years for Community Connection, the organization that operates the Senior Center as well as other programs, including Meals on Wheels and public transportation.

After retiring, Carpenter joined the nonprofit that had its origin in those weekly card games and potlucks in the late 1960s.

Its official name is Baker County Senior Citizens, Inc., and it was formed, by a group led by Rex Griggs, in 1977. Carpenter is the nonprofit’s current president.

For more than 45 years the organization, better known as simply Seniors Inc., has worked in collaboration with Community Connection to ensure local seniors have a robust schedule of activities and services.

For many years those events, including weekday lunches, took place at the Extension Building, the white structure at the northeast corner of Grove and Campbell streets (the building was removed more than two decades ago).

But then Tex Arteburn, who frequently attended lunches and played pool at the Extension Building, directly his family, after his death, to offer to sell to Seniors Inc. a property he owned east of Cedar Street and just south of D Street.

In 1994 Seniors Inc. bought the property for $65,000. Community Connection secured grants to build the senior center, which was finished in December 1999 and is owned by Seniors Inc.

In the nearly quarter century since then, Carpenter said, many of the local residents who spearheaded Seniors Inc. have passed away.

But the support for senior programs, through the federal government and other funding sources, has expanded, she said.

“The time had come to hand off the torch,” Carpenter said.

In November 2022, Ed Payton, a longtime president of Seniors Inc., said it became clear to him that the organization had achieved all the goals its members had when they formed the nonprofit in 1977.

There is, most notably, the senior center.

And Community Connection, which has always overseen the lunches and other activities — Seniors Inc. supported that work but wasn’t directly responsible for it, both Payton and Carpenter said — has stable funding sources to continue to offer a robust schedule of programs for local seniors.

And so the Seniors Inc. executive committee — Carpenter, Payton, Peggy Payton and Deanna Davis — decided during its annual meeting in November to dissolve the corporation and transfer its assets, including the senior center, to Community Connection.

This will have no effect on the senior center and its activities, Payton said, since Community Connection, as it has always been, is responsible for those.

“It’ll change absolutely nothing that goes on at the senior center,” he said.

Carpenter said Seniors Inc.’s assets, in addition to the senior center, include an endowment, created by a bequeathment from a local senior in 2007, that is worth about $100,000, along with about $30,000 in liquid assets.

That money will support senior programs through Community Connection in perpetuity through an agreement with Community Connection, Carpenter said.

Last year, Seniors Inc. donated $25,000 to the $400,000 project to expand the senior center by constructing six offices.

Community Connection will continue the Klothes Kloset donation program, started by Marian Kolb in 1993, as well as Friday Night card games if there is sufficient interest, Carpenter said.

Although local seniors will continue to help at the senior center, Carpenter and Payton said there is no longer any need to have a separate organization in Seniors Inc.

That wasn’t the case decades ago, Payton said.

He recalls a time, long before the current senior center was built, when Seniors Inc. had to quickly put together an auction — Stan Wellman served as auctioneer — to raise money to make up a $3,500 deficit in Community Connection’s budget for local senior programs.

Carpenter, who said many of the local seniors who have since passed were mentors to her during her career at Community Connection, said the formal end of Seniors Inc. is to her not a sad occasion, but rather a milestone that reflects the great accomplishments that seniors have made, starting with those weekly card games and potlucks during the Nixon administration.

“What a wonderful job all the people have done over the years,” Carpenter said. “The heart and soul that the seniors put into it over the years.”

“What a wonderful job all the people have done over the years. The heart and soul that the seniors put into it over the years.”

— Mary Jo Carpenter, Baker Seniors Inc. president and retired manager of Community Connection of Baker County