10,000 hours. 290,000 miles. For nearly 20 years, Clear Lake resident Ken Aure has been a volunteer driver for Sherburne County. At the first of this year he finally hung up his keys.
“It’s just been so much fun,” Aure said, “I’ve met so many people and had so many interesting experiences.”
Aure and his wife, Lora, moved to the Clear Lake area in 1995 after her employer, Liberty Paper offered her a new position in Becker. They fell in love with a house they found along the Mississippi River and knew they’d found their last home. The house was in need of repair but had a lot of potential.
Aure explained, “It was a labor of love.”
While Lora was working, Aure started looking for something to do with his time. He noticed an ad in the paper from the Sherburne County office in Becker that said they were looking for drivers. “I thought, what the heck, I’ll go in and talk to them,” said Aure. “One thing led to another, I started working for them and I just stayed.”
The Sherburne County Volunteer Driver program provides rides for residents of Sherburne County when they have no other transportation available. Seniors 65 years of age and older can also qualify for rides depending on their income.
Aure has high praise for the group of people he worked with through Sherburne County. “They were a fantastic, wonderful group.”
He had an arrangement with his coordinator in which she would call on Fridays to tell him what requests they had for the upcoming week and ask him which trips he wanted to make. This way he knew what was happening each week and could make plans for the days he wasn’t volunteering.
Once Lora retired eight years ago Aure didn’t cut back, explaining that since he was only driving one to three times a week they still had plenty of time to spend together.
Aure estimates that he drove hundreds, possibly thousands of people during his nearly 20 years as a volunteer driver. The rides were for a variety of things such as dialysis, medical and dental appointments, physical therapy, court appointments, and occasionally bringing family members together.
Often people asked for him by name.
“One of the most rewarding trips I made was to bring a group of four young siblings to Fargo to spend the holidays with their mom,” Aure reminisced.
“Lora questioned whether or not I was sure I wanted to take a bunch of kids on such a long trip but I wasn’t worried. They were very good, very nice kids and we had a great trip. The youngest sister had just had a birthday and she kept singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in the back seat.”
Although many of his trips were made around the local area, he often went farther, to places such as Duluth, Rochester and the Twin Cities.
“Thank God for four-wheel drive,” Aure said. “Without it I wouldn’t have made it to some of the places I had to go, and the rides were always first thing in the morning, usually before the plow trucks came by.”
Even so he never had an accident, went in the ditch or got stuck during all his years of volunteer driving. Once his car broke down on a return trip, but that’s the only incident he ever had.
Aure said his friends from the cities were envious of him because there aren’t any volunteer driving opportunities around there. “They were just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs while I was out having fun.”
He decided to retire once Sherburne County eliminated their volunteer driver program and Tri-CAP took over. To thank him for all his years of volunteerism, his co-workers held an appreciation ceremony Dec. 17, 2015 and presented him with a certificate commemorating all his hours and mileage put on his vehicle.
He’s read about older drivers like himself becoming drivers for Uber, which is a transportation network company that allows people with smart phones to submit a trip request through the Uber mobile app and get picked up by Uber drivers who use their own vehicles. “I invented Uber driving,” he laughed.
His wife, Lora, summed it up well. “He’s just a good guy.”
“It’s just been a nice, easy trip,” Aure said. “I’ve been totally blessed to have had this opportunity.”
