Jean & Bill Grizzell: “We feel safe here.”
Jean and Bill Grizzell have been married for 59 years. But when Jean reminisces about their years together, Bill looks at her with the eyes of a newlywed.
“We first met at Bill’s brother’s house,” Jean said. “A group of us were playing a game where you go through the alphabet and name a country or city with each letter. I had the letter ‘e’ and said ‘Eurasia,’ but Bill said there wasn’t such a place. I was so mad at him.” They were married a little more than a year later, in 1947.
Jean and Bill have lived at Twin Towers Place, located on Allen Street in Dayton, for almost four years. Twin Towers Place was the first low-income tax-credit senior residence built by St. Mary Development Corporation.
“The neighborhood we lived in was starting to go downhill,” Jean said. “It wasn’t safe. We had people knocking on our door at three in the morning. Now, if we need help, we can get it.”
Bill likes Twin Towers Place because it’s quiet. “Nobody bothers you,” he said.
The couple appreciates Twin Towers’ accessibility. Bill broke his hip before they moved into Twin Towers and uses a walker to get around. At Twin Towers, he doesn’t have any stairs to contend with. An aide visits Bill three times each week and a nurse checks in on him every Wednesday. On Tuesdays, the couple takes the SMDC van to go shopping at Meyers or Wal-Mart.
Despite his bad hip, Bill and Jean are on the Twin Towers volleyball team – chair volleyball, that is. In chair volleyball, teams of seven sit on either side of a three-foot high net. A beach ball is hit or kicked over the net. The first team to score 15 points wins.
“Sometimes we hit the ball, sometimes the ball hits us,” Jean said with a laugh.
The Twin Towers team, nicknamed the Tweety Birds,” played residents of Huffman Place recently.
“They won all three games,” Jean said. “But they’re younger than we are. Now we want to play the St. Mary staff.”
Bill and Jean Grizzell enjoy being part of the "Tweety Birds" -- the Twin Towers Place chair-volleyball team.
We work toward the day when
all residents of southwest Ohio -- especially the economically disadvantaged -- have a decent, affordable
place to live and become part of a thriving community.
