Wake today for beloved hospital volunteer
Northwest Community Hospital officials hosted their annual volunteer recognition luncheon Saturday, but without their leading volunteer.
Joan Westfall of Arlington Heights began volunteering before the hospital was built, serving lunch out of a trailer to construction workers.
On Saturday, she would have earned a pin for accumulating 23,000 hours of service, the most – by as many as 8,000 hours – of everyone in the crowd.
However, Mrs. Westfall never made the luncheon. She passed away Thursday at the hospital where she had volunteered for more than 45 years. She was 89.
For years, Mrs. Westfall volunteered on Tuesdays, greeting visitors at the reception desk, dispensing juice, menus and picture forms to new mothers in the Mother Baby Unit, and training new volunteers.
However, one of her favorite roles was completed at home, where she knitted thousands of caps for newborns infants born at the hospital, as well as cut out and sewed red stockings trimmed in holly berries for the 30 or so babies born over the holidays.
“It’s been wonderful. I look forward to Tuesdays,” Westfall said five years ago, when hospital officials honored her for 40 years of service.
“I love the interaction with the mothers and with the people I meet at the reception desk,” she added, “and the people I work with. It’s a pleasant and happy experience.”
Westfall began volunteering at Northwest Community in 1965, one year after moving to Arlington Heights, when her children were nearly grown. At the time she responded to an advertisement looking for volunteers.
Within five years, she moved into the bustling Mother Baby Unit, taking over as lead volunteer, and she soon became one of a handful of auxiliary members knitting tiny pink and blue caps for newborns.
Each volunteered followed the same pattern. It generally took about four hours to create one hat, which was the size of a children’s mitten.
“It’s one of our unique services, that every baby leaves with a hand knit baby cap made by a volunteer,” Dailey says. “Now we have something like 100 knitters out in the community working to make them.”
Along with the caps, Westfall and other early volunteers began adding the holiday stockings to their repertoire, which became a favorite tradition among mothers who delivered over the holidays.
Over the last decade, Westfall designed orange and blue Chicago Bears caps for infants, which she brought out every fall and kept enough in reserve in case the Bears made the Super Bowl.
“The baby caps have become such an endearing tradition,” Dailey added, “and Joan certainly had a hand in keeping them going all these years.”
Mrs. Westfall is survived by her husband of 68 years, Francis; her children, Pamela (Warren) Lexow and Robert (Pamela) Westfall; as well as seven grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
Visitation takes place from 3 to 9 p.m. today, before an 11 a.m. funeral service Tuesday, both at Glueckert Funeral Home, 1520 N. Arlington Heights Road in Arlington Heights.