Reward for 'rare breed'

No one was as surprised to find out Kay Richards was getting a lifetime achievement award as Kay Richards.

"I thought that would be done down the road a-ways," she said. "I'm not even done achieving."

The DuPage County Forest Preserve recognized the longtime volunteer from Lombard for her 12 years of service at a banquet ceremony last week in Glen Ellyn.

More Coverage Links Meet district's volunteer of the year

"Honestly, we were out of awards to give her," said Chris Linnell, the district's volunteer services supervisor.

Richards has been working in the Fullersburg Woods visitors center and teaching field trip classes there since 1996, she said. In addition, she began working in trail patrol five years ago and recently became an amphibian monitor.

"My nights weren't filled," she joked. "This is a program where we try to keep track of frogs in the forest preserves. I know the calls of 12 different frogs now."

It took her hours of listening to various frogs croaking before she felt comfortable going out on the monitoring trips that sometimes last until 1 a.m.

"I got in trouble for borrowing her headphones during that whole thing," said her husband, Mark Ailes.

"Oh yeah, that was trouble," she said. "He came between me and my volunteering."

Richards' excuse for racking up nearly 110 hours of volunteer time in various forest preserves last year is that she detests housework. But truth be told, it's probably because of the children she gets to work with often.

"I love the field trips at Fullersburg Woods; those kids are so darn cute," she said.

Besides her volunteer work with the forest preserve, she teaches children, ages 3 and 5, to swim at a private pool.

She claims the volunteer work is neither repetitive nor monotonous.

"We have a program at Fullersburg called 'Nature Detectives' and it's different every time because the kids find something different every time," she explained. "When one of the children finds an ant, you get excited with them about what they've found and the next thing you know you really are just as excited as they are. It's infectious."

Ailes doesn't have any problem sharing his wife with the forest preserve.

"I kind of count on her to do the volunteer work for the whole family," he said.

Richards once got him to join trail patrol -- a program where volunteers keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary on the various forest preserve trails throughout the county.

"I had to take his vest back," she said. "I made him quit because he wouldn't do it enough."

Linnell called her star volunteer a "rare breed."

To validate volunteer program operations to board members, Linnell not only keeps track of the hours volunteers work, but what that translates to in salary.

In Richards' case she has worked 1,975 hours during her volunteer career with the district. The work she has done would have cost the district $33,137 if she were paid personnel, Linnell said.

"That's an extraordinary amount of volunteering," she said.

Richards said she had no idea they had a way of translating her work hours into dollar figures.

"That's kind of weird," she said.

She claims she gets as much out of the volunteer work as she gives.

"Mentally it put me in a great space," she said. "Over time, I find if I don't get out there I not only feel out of shape, but I'm unhappy."

And while she has not been able to avoid housework as a result of her volunteer work, she claims to have found a system that gets the job done.

"We go on a 15-minute blitz and at the end of the 15 minutes you can quit," she said. "But usually you've done so much, you want to finish the job."