“When we decided to run a weekly bingo game,” Arc Executive Director Joe Sirois told me recently, “we wanted to make sure we weren’t competing with any other organization.”

Hard to avoid: There’s a bingo game every day of the week in the River Valley: Eagles, Sons of Italy, Dixfield Legion, St. Athanasius and St. John, the Snow Shoe Club.

Have I missed any? Arc found an empty slot – Sunday afternoon.

Back in 1956, a group of parents and friends of mentally retarded children decided that institutionalizing the retarded was unacceptable. They formed the Association for Retarded Children. “My wife and I visited Pownal,” then the state’s only facility for the retarded, one parent wrote, “and came home determined never to place our child (there) and walk away.”

Because of Arc, their children could stay in the community and be a part of it.

Another founder wrote, “This was a classic lost cause, for we were engaging not a physical foe, but the most difficult of all, a mindset that had persisted since the first mother and father had looked at a child and wept.”

But their cause was not lost. Fifty years later, Arc supports more than 80 program participants, retarded people who are accepted, respected and welcome in the community. Why not? They volunteer, at Rumford Community Home, for example; they are employed, at Sunday River, for instance.

The Arc operates three group homes, a day habilitation program, and a supported employment program. All but one member of the “very strong, very invested” board is related to an Arc client.

Income from the Whatnot Shop and the Briar Patch greenhouse augment Arc’s income. It took a while to get going, but Sunday bingo turns a profit, “enough to help us enlarge the vehicle fleet.”

Volunteers are critical. The Sunday afternoon bingo game could not happen without them: Vito and Jeanne Gacetta, John Patrick, Jolene Lovejoy, Edgar Gallant, Alice Hines, Calvin Lyons, Merle Phelps, Dot Bernard and Pat Mercier.

March is National Retardation Awareness Month, a good month for Arc’s annual appeal. I’ll bet Joe Sirois’ letter will read in part, “We are proud of receiving the highest possible rating in a national survey of supported employment programs.”

Linda Farr Macgregor lives with her husband, Jim in Rumford. She is a freelance writer and author of “Rumford Stories.” Contact her at [email protected].