Linton Stables Raises Spirits and Funds
Linton Stables got involved in community work when he was living in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the 1990s. Some of his neighbors were complaining about homeless people sleeping on their stoops and in local parks. “I felt some of the homeowners’ attitude was kind of like, ‘we got ours’,” Stables recalls. “‘And we don’t care about anybody else’.”
So he and some like-minded friends worked to come up with creative solutions. They didn’t want to banish people to another neighborhood. “The problems — if they were real problems — all had solutions,” he says. His group asked a local high school to offer access to their showers. They worked with churches to open basements for people to sleep in. That work gave him a taste for the pleasures of community involvement.
Stables’ involvement in Swarthmore came about more accidentally. His late mother-in-law had moved in with Stables and his husband, Greg Brown, and Stables thought she needed to get out of the house. So he started bringing her to the Wednesday programs offered by the Swarthmore Senior Citizens Association. “She fell off from it,” Stables recalls. “But I kept going, because I thought the programs were interesting.”
Before long, the association’s president, Lew Rinko, asked Stables — who had recently retired from his job as the Chief of Specifications for the architecture firm Perkins Eastman — if he would join the board. Stables said he would. Then, Rinko asked if Stables would serve as board secretary. Stables agreed. A month later, Rinko suddenly died.
At that point, Stables got a call from another board member. “They said, ‘We don’t have a vice president’,” he recalls. It turned out that the secretary was next in line for the presidency. “It’s the story of my life!” he says. “I find myself in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.”
Senior Priorities
Under Stables’ leadership, the Swarthmore seniors group began to change. What had been largely a social club (“Social clubs are needed,” Stables notes) with an educational component began to focus more on its members looking out for each other. “We need to be more directly responsible for each other’s well-being,” he says.
When the COVID-19 pandemic started, this function became more urgent. Stables began a daily newsletter to help seniors feel less isolated. Filled with information about events and fundraising efforts, art by community members, and often a bit of humor, it reaches about 500 households.
The need for distancing has been uniquely hard for seniors, who often live alone and may not be comfortable with computers and smartphones. In response, the association is looking for ways to make technology work better for them. “What if we were to do arts and crafts?” Stables suggests. “We could put together boxes of materials and tools, and deliver them to the 15 or 20 people who sign up. And then do the class on Zoom. A combination of tactile and staring at your screen.”
He hopes that even after the pandemic recedes, technology might help alleviate the loneliness that often comes as people age. “If seniors can be convinced to go online — which is a big if — we could make a big dent in the isolation problem.”
He would also like to see the association step into advocacy. Early in the pandemic, he was disturbed by the idea that the deaths of older people might be the price the country needed to pay to keep the economy open. “That’s not acceptable,” Stables insists. “We need to stand up.”
Stables says the senior citizens association would like to stay nonpolitical. “But you can’t,” he adds. “I learned this from being gay. Our lives are political. And they’re made political — not by us — but by society.”
Before Swarthmore
Born in Virginia, Stables grew up mostly in Texas. “I’m an army brat, so my family moved around a lot.” He studied architecture at Rice University, then worked for a couple of years as an urban planner in Brownsville. That’s where he first got involved with government and learned how cities work. He studied for a master’s degree in architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute but never finished his thesis.
Then he joined the army. “It was my two years of active duty that got me to San Francisco.” As part of the Army Corps of Engineers, he learned a lot. After his discharge, he found a job as an architectural specifications writer.
What are architectural specifications?
“When one hires an architect,” Stables explains, “the product — before you get the building built — is a set of drawings and a book. The book explains the drawings.” His job was to write the book, specifying all the materials to be used in the buildings — essential for determining a building’s quality. Take brick. “Until you explain what the brick is, where it comes from, how it’s made, the size of the bricks, and how the bricks are laid, you haven’t shown the quality of the building.”
San Francisco was also where, in 2001, Stables met Brown. “We were singing in the same church choir,” he says. Both men sang bass. A few years later, the couple moved to Brooklyn Heights, where they married on New Year’s Eve, 2011.
Then Brown was offered a job at Swarthmore College. The opportunity to be vice president for finance and administration at a top liberal arts college would be hard to turn down. But their move to the borough was not a foregone conclusion.
“We had a lot of discussion about it,” Stables recalls. “It was a great job and a great community.” But it was also Pennsylvania, which at the time did not recognize gay marriage. “Where did that put us? Were we married or not?” The college had strong non-discrimination policies, but “We could still be denied a mortgage on a house, or any number of other rights.”
Stables was also uncertain about moving to a suburb. Swarthmore would be his first since he left home for college.
In the end, they took the plunge. The move worked out well, not least because Pennsylvania (along with the rest of the U.S.) recognized gay marriage soon afterwards. Above all, Swarthmore seemed like a supportive community that could become home.
Suburban living is especially welcome now, given COVID-19 restrictions. “I love that I can walk right out in my backyard and be outside,” Stables says. “We can eat outside when we want to. And we can have dogs.”
Citizen of the Year
In 2020, Stables was awarded the Swarthmore Lions Club Citizen of the Year Award. The unanimous vote recognized his work not only for the Swarthmore Senior Citizens Association, but also for the borough’s Aging-in-Place Task Force, the Swarthmore Appalachia Service Project (a joint project of Swarthmore Presbyterian Church and Swarthmore United Methodist Church), and other efforts.
One gift he brings to community work is his affinity for fundraising, which he calls “telling a story that shows you what the opportunities are for you to be generous.” He doesn’t like cold-calling, but “I don’t mind talking to friends about the things I’m passionate about.” He doesn’t mind asking people to give money.
“Everyone needs to be generous,” Stables says. “And if somebody’s not generous, it’s because they’re not being given the right opportunities.”
Stables says his ambitions for social change have become more modest in recent years. But he’s thinking about ways to get more involved in Chester, where he currently sits on the foundation board of the Chester Charter Scholars Academy (formerly the Chester Charter School for the Arts). Just before the pandemic, he had been working with FUSE (the Fellowship of Urban Suburban Engagement) to organize joint lunches for seniors from Swarthmore and Chester.
“In an earlier decade of my life, I would have wanted to have a master plan,” he says. Now, though, “if it’s, ‘let’s get together and build picnic tables in the park one Saturday, or every Saturday,’” that’s fine with him.
Or just get together for lunch and talk. “Get to realize what we have in common, and what’s different. And out of that, hopefully, there will be relationships developed. And maybe out of that could come some ideas for how we might all work together.”
