Remembering Anita Russel, 1922-2006

When I came to CUB in 1992, CUB was having a hard time. We had 1.5 full time staff. We were in debt. But we had one amazing committed volunteer who believed in the organization and came in nearly every day for the next 10 years in order to help CUB.

Her name was Anita Russel and she passed away recently. It is accurate to say that CUB probably would not be around if it were not for Anita. It is not clear how we could have handled the workload needed to rebuild the organization without her help. She did much of the work associated with our direct mail fundraising program. This allowed me to focus on CUB’s program of fighting for utility consumers.

Anita became our bookkeeper, but she was always more than that.

She maintained our financial records, our membership records, stuffed envelops and whatever else needed to be done.  Eventually, as CUB grew, we felt that we should pay her for her amazing work and brought her on staff.  However, Anita did not like being paid by CUB. She did not want to see the money that CUB members contributed going into her pocket. She was retired and did not need the income, so she soon returned to being a volunteer—a volunteer who came in every day and did a professional job.

At one point when she was considering retiring (she stayed a few more years), we put together a plaque that said: “The grateful staff of Citizens’ Utility Board extend this Bear Hug as a token of our appreciation of, indebtedness to, and admiration for Anita Russell. For the past eight years and more, she has given freely of her time to keep the office doors open, its records organized and accounts accurate, added verve to office conversation and in general made the office hum like a top.” True to form, Anita was moved by the tribute but uncomfortable being the center of attention. She was all about doing the work, and not looking for the praise that was her due.

Eventually, as her hearing and eyesight began to fail, she was forced to retire from CUB, but she continued to support the organization and continued to donate money to us every single month. She contributed to us financially for more than 18 years and worked as a volunteer with us for more than a decade. Few, if anyone, have contributed more to CUB than Anita.

I will miss Anita. I can picture the way her face would light up when I would bring in baby pictures of my daughter. Her family was important to her, and she cared about our families. Our hearts go out to her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Bob Jenks
CUB Executive Director

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Of the 6 staff who make up CUB today, I am one of only 2 people who did not know and work with Anita Russel. I met her at the 20th Anniversary dinner in 2004, a reserved and dignified woman seeming to be in her 70s, but we only exchanged a few words. And yet, I still feel a connection to Anita. You see, I took over her desk and much of the work she did here (as a volunteer!) at CUB.

When I was hired in August of 2003 to manage the business end of CUB, we had been without a bookkeeper since Anita had finally “retired” (her second retirement) many months before. Bob Jenks, our fearless leader, has knowledge of the utility industry both broad and deep, and does amazing work in many different venues, but organization of paperwork isn’t one of them. I began the slow process of digging backward through boxes of bills, taxes, and miscellanous jumble until I got to the place Anita left off. What a difference!

I gradually came to know Anita through her small neat rows of figures, the thousands of handwritten checks, the spreadsheets she created to track our finances, and the mark of her hand is seen on folders that I still use regularly. She fulfilled an important role rarely seen by the public; she was the administrative mechanic who kept things on track, kept the wheels turning, so that CUB could remain a spokesperson and advocate for all residential Oregon utility ratepayers. With her help CUB survived some tumultuous and lean early years.

I don’t know what it was about CUB, out of all the good causes in the world, that drew Anita. But she chose CUB, and stayed with a loyalty that kept her here many years, giving of her time generously and skillfully.  I didn’t know the woman, but I know and appreciate the legacy of her work here at CUB.

Shannon Floyd
CUB Business & Projects Manager

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In 1966, Anita took her barely-teenaged daughters on the train to Seattle to see the Beatles. I suppose other parents must have done this with their children, but the way she quickly embraced their music must surely have been unusual. (Forty years later, the Beatles were still her favorite.) She took her children to see lots of music: they saw The Who open for Herman’s Hermits; they saw Janis Joplin in San Francisco as a second choice, after the Monterey Jazz Festival they had gone to see was cancelled. They saw the Lovin’ Spoonful and Donovan ... and they went to at least one peace march together.

Those of us who worked with her at CUB never suspected that Anita had quite such a colorful past, because she was always so modest and unassuming. But these details of her life are perfectly consistent with the Anita we knew. Take, for example, the picture of her with her husband Roy from what appears to be the early 1950s: him charging down the street with his flattop haircut and a big cigar in his hand, and there’s Anita beside him, hand hooked on his arm, laughing to beat the band. They look great together, happy and in love. Then come the years of photos of her with her children as they grow up, and then her children’s children—and in every one of them, Anita has the same bright eyes we knew, the sparkling eyes that always wanted to learn.

None of this, of course, did I know in March of 1998, when I met her for the first time. I was hired to write fundraising letters for CUB, to try to grow the membership. Anita was the woman who handled the money, the woman with the Depression-era attitude about spending money: a penny saved is a penny earned, and all that. Her job was to be frugal, and mine was to spend money on envelopes and printing with the hope that CUB would get it all back, along with a few more members. In her eyes, I was gambling with money that wasn’t my own; fortunately, CUB won more than it lost, and when she called me “Mr. Moneybags,” she meant it fondly.

CUB was the job she took after retiring from the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a federal contracting officer. She used to say she worked at CUB because it “kept her out of the taverns,” which was funny, but funnier if you knew her. Taverns! As if. A liberal always, she was one of CUB’s first members, and she was always passionate about its work. CUB was fiscally shaky when she started working there, and when she left 10 years later, it had become strong and robust. And though she would have pooh-poohed the idea, she was part of the reason for its survival. She was an ace of a money manager, methodical and canny.

She read voraciously, continuously. In fact, that’s how we connected. I loved literature, and so did she; we’d talk about books we’d both read, and we loaned books to each other many times. She even kept up with the online literary journal I started, which really flattered me—knowing she had trouble with her eyesight and thinking I was a special exception—until I found out she was surfing the Net right up until the very end of her life. See what I mean about her love of learning?

I left CUB in 2000. Anita stayed several more years before retiring herself. She was important to CUB—and to me. I’m going to miss her. We all will.

Benjamin Chambers
CUB Development Director 1998-2000

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