Editor’s note: A new series on the famous and infamous leaving a mark on Central and Western Maine.

Virginia Durr talks about how her mom was best friends with Rosa Parks. How the family knew Martin Luther King Jr. How over her 70 years she’s been fired and laid off, and hardly ever resisted a chance to fight the system — fight the system, but, she says, still love the people.

Then a woman with a black eye shows up outside Durr’s bare office at the Sweden Community Church. Durr is intake volunteer on food pantry day. She clears the room. The woman is a first-timer.

They need to talk.

Her own interview can wait.

“She’s so warm. … She calms their nerves,” said Terri Johnson, coordinator of the Sewing Seeds For Life Food Pantry. “She lets them know that we’re all in this together.”

Durr grew up in the south, lived in Washington, D.C., for a long stretch, and moved to Sweden, Maine, 14 years ago, a little Oxford County town that the U.S. Census puts at 370 people. Social work positions brought her north.

She’s made a name for herself here, and quickly. She eats breakfast at Rosie’s restaurant in nearby Lovell every morning. She’s an active volunteer, a prolific writer of letters to the editor. For two-plus years Durr has had an ongoing exchange in the letters pages of The Bridgton News with a man she calls, through her red lipstick smile, her nemesis.

“Writing always helps me to clarify my own thoughts and to keep me sane,” she said.

The letters are civil, long, almost academic. Her father, activist and lawyer Clifford Durr, offered advice a long time ago that she remembers whenever she’s drawn into an issue.

“If you start hating and become bitter, you’re doing yourself in and anything you want to accomplish in,” said Durr, her long, white hair pushed back by glasses on the top of her head. “It’s hard for me because sometimes I’m full of rage and expletives.”

One of four girls born to her civil rights parents, Durr was named after her mother, Virginia. People call her Tilla.

Jesse Stevens met her through a neighbor. They took turns sitting with an elderly man so his wife could run errands.

“Neighbors looking out for neighbors is quite a theme for Tilla,” he said.

She’s been with the food pantry since it opened over a year ago. It serves 65 to 70 people the first and third Wednesdays of the month. She also started the Sweden Community Emergency Fund, which has helped pay for large, one-time emergencies like fuel bills, new roofs and used cars.

“She’s something else. Rebel with a cause,” said Beverly Bishop. They met six years ago in a walking group. “She’s a wonderful, wonderful addition to the community.”

Durr’s writing a memoir, “In Search of the Golden Rule.” Her father, she said, was one of the first to defend people against McCarthyism in the 1950s. The book will also delve into her own fights. Speaking up — and getting fired — when she felt at one job that ethics were being bent and clients over-medicated. Speaking up — and getting a program shut down — when she complained that, despite heavy government subsidies, corners were being cut with her social work kids, less emphasis on education and nutrition, more trips to the arcade and KFC.

“I’ve always been kind of a whistle-blower muckraker type,” she said.

Johnson has read a draft of “Golden Rule.” She told Durr after, “You have such a history!”

“I didn’t know that,” Johnson said. “It just opened up this whole other world of Tilla.”

Know someone who would make an interesting feature? Someone that everyone knows? Tell us. Call staff writer Kathryn Skelton at 689-2844 or e-mail at [email protected]

Virginia Durr talks about her vast life experiences between organizing various projects at the Sweden Community Church where she is an intake volunteer on food pantry day.