By LINDA CHION KENNEY
As a “firm believer that whatever happens in your childhood shapes you as an adult,” Connie Huber spoke lovingly of a father who sacrificed to give and how paying it forward enriched her life on a much deeper level.
It was an expected pitch of sorts to hear at a fundraiser in support of an area nonprofit that depends greatly on the largesse of community members. And Huber, as a board member for the Emergency Care Help Organization, knew exactly why her pitch was necessary to give at a luncheon fundraiser for ECHO and its south county expansion.
In addition to food and clothing needs, ECHO services include job-search assistance, financial literacy assistance, job coaching, GED instruction in English and Spanish, and workshops on a variety of topics, including free certification training and shopping with coupons. Neighbors, as ECHO clients are called, gain assistance as well through online channels, including for unemployment insurance and for food stamp assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
In a nutshell, ECHO serves those in need, which Huber said she never knew included her, as she gave a recounting of her early years in the Philippines and later as an emigree to the U.S. and on through her adult life in Hillsborough County.
Huber, who works for Physician Partners of America and was chair of the Sun City Center Area Chamber of Commerce in 2018, started her ECHO speech last month at The Barn Theatre in Riverview’s Winthrop community with a personal note.
She recounted the day her mother asked Huber and one of her three sisters to pick up fundraiser donuts from a nearly elementary school.
When a teacher asked the Huber girls if they needed help carrying the donuts to their car, they answered, “We don’t have a car,” Huber said, “and I guess that is the first time that I felt I was underprivileged.”
Her father was using the family’s only car for work, and it was much later Huber would learn that the “consequences of what my father did actually made me who I am today.”
Recruited into the U.S. Navy in the 1960’s, Huber’s father “worked hard and eventually retired after 26 years,” Huber said.
“He then worked for the U.S. Post Office, for close to 20 years, until his death.”
Meanwhile, her mother was a stay-at-home mom and housewife while her dad was at sea, “protecting the country,” Huber said. “I still remember coming home from school every day to find snacks laid out before we started our homework.”
The family “definitely did not go without food,” Huber said. And they had their own home, although at 1,200 square feet and three bedrooms for six people, Huber found herself one day asking her dad a tough question.
“I finally asked my father, why several of my friends’ fathers had the same job in the navy, and we were not on the same economic status,” Huber said. “Why couldn’t we afford the larger home?”
At the time, Huber said she knew her father had sent money to his mother and to his wife’s family, “but I never knew to what extent.” How much so was learned in 2021, the year both Huber’s father and mother died, five months apart, and relatives shared their remembrances.
Huber said she learned that for the past 50 years, her father had “actually supported them to live, not with happy extras, but to live.” She would come to realize “how much he had sacrificed to support so many, so my mother’s family could eat.”
Lesson learned shapes Huber today, predicated on the knowledge that “when I thought we were poor, my dad was rich enough to give, rich enough to share, rich enough to sacrifice.”
“Because of what happened in my childhood, all my sisters, including myself, strive to help,” Huber said. “All four daughters are college educated. With all his sacrifices, he made us work harder and also taught us to pay it forward and to make sacrifices with our own home.”
“My work is done,” Huber remembers her father saying, shortly before he died.
So, “just never forget where you came from because you can actually change somebody’s life,” Huber said. “The money you give today can give a bright future to a family, just like my dad did.”
For more on ECHO and its needs and donation opportunities, visit www.echofl.org/.
