Bruce Adams and Mary Canapary

• Share

PRINT

For each of the past 25 years, Montgomery County, Maryland, has honored two older adults with the annual Neal Potter Path of Achievement Award for their lifelong commitment to volunteer service.

The awards, named after former County Executive Neal Potter, are co-sponsored by the Montgomery County Commission on Aging and the Beacon Newspapers.

This year, the county selected Bruce Adams and Mary Canapary. They will receive their awards at a public ceremony at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 25, in the Rosborough Cultural Arts & Wellness Center at Asbury Methodist Village.

‘Volunteering is my life’

Bruce Adams can’t imagine doing nothing. “I’d lose my mind,” he told the Beacon in a recent interview.

Currently, he is working with about 45 young people involved with two of his main volunteer projects — the Bethesda Community Base Ball Club and the Lazarus Leadership Fellows Program at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. Adams was the founder of both programs.

He is also the founder and a board member of the Cal Ripken Sr. Collegiate Baseball League, and serves on the boards of Montgomery Sister Cities, Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail, and the Fields of Dreams after-school program in Anacostia.

Altogether, his volunteer projects can take up to 70 hours a week. But rather than finding all that effort draining, Adams says, “That’s invigorating. That keeps you going.”

Growing up in Montgomery County, Adams watched his parents actively build their community. With a group of friends, they helped build up the suburb of Potomac in the 1950s, and they often brought him with them to various events.

“When a church was needed, they built a church; and when a garden club was needed, they started a garden club; and when they needed an almanac, they started the Potomac Almanac [newspaper],” Adams said.

In college at Princeton University, Adams wasn’t active in politics until his junior year. That’s when he took a course with Dr. Eric Goldman, the author of Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform.

The book described the social activism movements that swept across the U.S. from mid-19^th to mid-20^th century. “That book changed my life,” Adams said.

When he returned to this area to attend Georgetown University Law Center, he joined the board of Suburban Maryland Fair Housing and began getting involved in politics.

One of his duties involved monitoring Housing Authority meetings, where he would watch Joyce Siegel in action. (Siegel will be receiving the Roscoe R. Nix Distinguished Community Leadership Award at the same event as Adams.)

“I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be like when I grow up. I want to be Joyce Siegel.’ She was so diligent and thoughtful,” Adams reflected.

“So that was my goal in life, to be able to serve on boards and commissions, and volunteer and try to make Montgomery County a better place.”

While still in law school, Adams started working part-time for Common Cause, a citizen’s advocacy nonprofit founded by his mentor, John Gardener. It was at Common Cause that Adams first worked with groups at the state and local levels drafting model bills.

“And then I just kept getting involved,” Adams said.

Adams served as an elected member of the Montgomery County Council from 1986 to 1994, including a term as Council President from 1991 to 1992.

His initiatives there included Community Service Day (which later launched on a national level), the Montgomery Housing Initiative, the Commission on Child Care, the Capital Crescent Trail, and many others.

In 1996, Adams founded the Lazarus Leadership Fellows Program at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, which he continues to run today. The Lazarus Fellows have completed more than 77,000 hours of service to the local community.

“That’s amazing to me,” Adams said. “[The students] are in the community doing something that wouldn’t happen but for their leadership.”

Adams tells his young interns, “You got to roll up your sleeves and go to work. Whatever you see, you own. See a piece of trash, you pick it up; you see a person struggling, and you go help them.”

This summer, you can find Adams assisting at the collegiate baseball games of the Bethesda Big Train team. Adams founded the Bethesda Community Base Ball Club in 1998 and spearheaded the construction of the Shirley Povich Field in Cabin John Regional Park, where the team plays each June and July. He is also the club’s president.

“I’ve never had a job where I wasn’t really proud and happy about what I was doing. So that’s lucky. I mean, how many people get that?” —Ana Preger Hart

40 years serving the homeless

Mary Canapary found her calling in the early 1980s, when she helped establish the Gaithersburg Soup Kitchen, where she still volunteers in her mid-eighties.

Growing up “at a time of incredible poverty in Ireland” gave her the compassion to treat everyone, no matter their circumstances, with kindness, she said.

“Whatever skills I was blessed with, one of them was that I knew what it was like to walk in those shoes,” she said.

Canapary immigrated to America alone when she was 17. “I knew that [leaving Ireland] was my fate from when I was really young, because we were orphans. There were not many options for our future except to emigrate.”

She got a job in Manhattan and soon met the man who would become her husband of 62 years and the father of her four children.

When the family moved to Maryland for his job, Canapary mentioned to her new neighbors that she had previously helped out at a Connecticut soup kitchen and enjoyed the work.

A month later, she got a phone call from a local church, St. Martin’s, asking her to help establish a soup kitchen for homeless people. She did — and never left, becoming its defacto president and now its chairperson emerita.

In the past 40 years, Canapary also helped create the Wells Robinson House in downtown Gaithersburg, a post-rehabilitation homeless shelter, and the Dwelling Place, a family shelter.

“When we started, there was no such thing as shelters” in the area, Canapary said. “The whole picture got brighter and easier for people who were in great distress.”

The Gaithersburg Soup Kitchen serves four-course meals every day except Sunday. Canapary has never received a paycheck for her decades of work, but “there was great freedom in it,” she said.

“Volunteering was a wonderful way to feel at the end of a day. Just walking out knowing that you had done some wee thing to help someone else — maybe one big thing to help someone else — was far better than all the money in the world.” —Margaret Foster

For free tickets to the ceremony conferring the Path of Achievement, Roscoe Nix and other awards and honors from Montgomery County, visit bit.ly/PathAwards2024.