Jim McDaniel wheeled meals for 20 years

Jim McDaniel, plaque, director Kathy Keuski

Jim McDaniel, Class of 1960, who has dodged adversity during his long Air Force career, last October when Hurricane Joaquin flooding drove Jim and wife Mary Bolin McDaniel from their Rehoboth Beach, Delaware home for two days and in April when a neighbor’s propane tank exploded into a giant fireball across the street from the McDaniel home, burned 100 acres and caused $75,000 in damage to three mobile homes, was honored for his 20 years of service as an outreach worker in the Meals on Wheels Lewes-Rehoboth program.

The adjoining Lews and Rehoboth areas combined for the Meals on Wheels project. Kathy Keuski has been its director for 25 years.

When she began, there were 62 clients and the meals were prepared at the Lewes Senior Center. Today the program serves more than 110,000 meals a year to more than 351 clients.

They are prepared in the huge kitchens at Fish On restaurant in the Villages of Five Points and people like Jim McDaniel deliver them to the doors of the elderly and handicapped.  There are 14 routes and 120 volunteer drivers, including Jim.

After making sure that the neighbor’s fireball didn’t damage the McDaniel home, Jim took donations to the park office to help out the fire victims.

Rehoboth Beach and Lewes are the principal small towns in Delaware's Cape Region.

Jim and Mary celebrated their 37^th wedding anniversary on March 15. Jim met Mary, by then from Upper Marlboro, Maryland, at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland.

Jim’s siblings are Jo Ann McDaniel Huff, Class of 1949, who lives at the bottom of Kings Alley in Worthington; Mary Jane McDaniel Pritchard; and the late Donald McDaniel, Class of 1946.

Their mom was Mary Curry McDaniel, who with 5 siblings were raised in the hotel owned by their father, Carroll Curry, who owned the hotel, theater and bank on the same street in downtown Monongah. 

They are the grandchildren of long-ago Monongah stationmaster Ted McDaniel and Adrian Curry McDaniel, Class of 1923.

Mary Curry McDaniel's sister was Ava Curry Cogar, married to Fred Cogar and living on Cottage Avenue. Ava and my mother, Lena Futten Olesky, who lived across Camden Avenue (U.S. 19) on Church Street with John W. Olesky, Sr., were best friends and often sat on our back porch and talked of many things.

Ava was the lay assistant in 1924 when St. Stanislaus Church priest Father Lawrence Michalski asked Mother Mary Ursula, Mother Mary Arsenia and Sister Mary Clara to begin St. Stanislaus School. It later was renamed Sts. Peter and Paul School.