A month of hours

A month of hours

First came the crippling re-injury of Kathi Jensen’s spine. Then the loss of her husband’s job and the couple’s health insurance while she was undergoing $700-a-month physical therapy critical to her ability to walk. Followed by the couple being forced to move into a half-finished home in the middle of the winter.

Such was the 2013 Christmas season for Kathi and Gary Jensen.

“All of a sudden, we were out-of-pocket everything,” she says. The money they were counting on to finish their house, designed to ease the stress on Kathi’s disintegrating spine, vaporized in the face of medical bills and basic living expenses.

To say that The Home Depot and American Legion Post 56 of Idaho arrived at a critical moment would be an understatement. “Once we started on the house, we couldn’t really turn back,” Gary says.

To understand how much a $4,500 grant and hours of donated labor meant to the Jensens, it’s important to understand how these two veterans – she served in the National Guard, he in the Army – arrived at the intersection of hopeless and discouraged.

Kathi fell and injured her spine at her day job with California’s Imperial County Health Department in 1985. Surgery was too risky and rehabilitation nonexistent. “Back then, they kind of wrote people off,” she says. “Basically they taught you to live out of a wheelchair, and that’s that.”

She spent four months of a yearlong hospital stay in traction and the next five years rehabilitating herself. “I began to study exercise physiology and neurology books,” says Kathi, who was a nurse in the National Guard until the injury ended her service. “I wheeled myself down to the track where the Blue Angels ran. I would stand, fall over, and often those guys would help stand me back up.” She kept trying. By 1990, Kathi could finally walk without crutches and braces.

In the years following, she met and married Gary Jensen, who served first with the infantry and then as a helicopter mechanic in Vietnam. The couple made their living training and transporting show horses across the country for private clients as well as winning national championships with their own horses. That ended in late 2007 after Kathi started experiencing intense pain and inexplicable muscle contractions. The couple moved into a little log house with a concrete floor on a piece of property they owned in Howe, Idaho, an unincorporated community 86 miles west of Idaho Falls. Gary began working on a nearby farm.

Kathi soon required surgery to repair four collapsed neck vertebrae and started intense physical therapy. But the concrete floors in their house, which had served as Kathi’s weight room between horse transport trips, exacerbated her spinal problems. So the couple signed an agreement to sell the house and started to build a home designed to ease the pain and strain on her back.

“We really debated taking this on,” Gary says. “At the time, I didn’t know I would lose the job I’d had for six or seven years.”

Every minute Gary wasn’t working his day job he spent on their new house – plumbing, wiring, insulating, running for supplies. About four months into their construction project, his boss cut his hours to near zero and eliminated his health insurance benefits. The sale of the Jensens’ old house closed, forcing them to move – first to Idaho Falls to live with Jensen’s daughter and, after the cost of commuting to Howe became overwhelming, into their unfinished home.

It took Gary months to find a new job – one that paid about half as much as his previous position and required him to commute 90 miles round-trip each day. Work on the couple’s house stalled. Kathi cut back on her physical therapy to save money.

Two things happened amid these dark days. First, Post 56 Commander Bob Skinner heard about the Jensens’ troubles through his contacts in the eastern Idaho veterans community. “I asked if I could meet them and find out what their plight was,” he says. “At the time we went out there, they had a functioning toilet in the home, and that was it. They carried water to the house in a bucket.”

Workers at the Home Depot store in Idaho Falls, which the Jensens frequented, had also learned of the couple’s dilemma. “We were all crying before Kathi was done telling her story,” says store operations manager Kristin Shurtz. “The Jensens are just the kind of people you want to help because they are both veterans. And they were victims of our economy.”

The Home Depot Foundation has helped repair and renovate more than 13,000 veterans’ homes since 2011. Individual stores can fix the little things that make a huge difference: weatherizing windows, insulating attics, even installing a heater on a stock watering tank for an eastern Idaho veteran who was chipping ice on winter mornings so his animals could drink.

In addition, each store can apply for grants of up to $12,000 to help veterans. All it takes is a grant application and a willing nonprofit partner. Enter Post 56.
“Bob Skinner is pretty amazing,” says Shurtz, whose father also belongs to the Idaho Falls Legion post. “He really is all about serving veterans and serving the community.”

Skinner sent the grant application to the Home Depot Foundation on Feb. 14, the Jensens’ anniversary. They got word in April that they had received a $4,500 grant that paid for sheetrock, bathroom tile and plumbing fixtures, a utility sink, flooring for the laundry room and other materials. “They were living in a shell,” Shurtz says. “That’s no way for a veteran to live.”

The Idaho Falls Home Depot found a contractor who installed the sheetrock for the price of gas money to Howe. Then, in June, 10 Home Depot volunteers and 10 volunteers from Post 56 headed to the Jensens’ home with their tools in hand. They installed the bathtub, tile, toilet and laundry room sink – Post 56 Legionnaire Darrel Homer is a master plumber – and put down the laundry room flooring. They also hooked up the hot-water heater and wrapped the house in Tyvek.

“The time The Home Depot and American Legion volunteers put in – that was a month of hours for me,” Gary Jensen says. “There’s no way we could have done that without their help.”

“It will be a cherished day,” Kathi adds. “There were a lot of hugs handed out.”

Post 56 put on an auction in October and raised another $3,000, which purchased a wood stove and chimney to heat the Jensen house. There are still plenty of hurdles before the Jensens have a fully livable home, given tight finances and the cost of Kathi’s ongoing medical care that isn’t covered by Medicare. They manage to buy one light fixture a month and are trying to figure out how to finish the kitchen, insulate and side the house, and install the rest of the flooring.

Kathi worries about her husband’s health as much as or more than her own. Approaching 70, Gary works as a farmhand six days a week, putting in especially long hours during harvest. He has Type II diabetes, one of about a dozen illnesses VA recognizes as linked to Agent Orange exposure among veterans like him who had boots on the ground in Vietnam. Despite that indisputable service connection, VA recently denied his Agent Orange claim.

Kathi also feels conflicted about the couple’s inability to do it on their own.

“I feel uneasy about asking for help,” she says, surveying the bare sheetrock walls and dusty subfloors of their future living room. “But to have the Legion behind us makes me feel like I’m part of something greater than myself.”

Ken Olsen is a frequent contributor to The American Legion Magazine.

Learn more about The American Legion’s and The Home Depot’s efforts to help Kathi and Gary Jensen here.