Clifton Woolf, 92, spent more than four decades serving his country in the military. Now that he’s retired, he focuses on serving his community.
“For 41 years I did what I was told to do, supposed to do, and had an obligation to do,” Woolf said. “And now, if I can help somebody, I will.”
Woolf, who is our most recent Hidden Hero winner, ran the local National Guard Armory for many years and has also been extensively involved in real estate in the area, signing more than 300 deeds over six decades, he said. In developing all that property, he has come a long way from where he started.
“I was born in a two-room house in a cotton patch. It was about 12 feet wide and about 24 feet long, right out in the middle of the cotton patch. No electricity, no water, no car, nothing. Right during the Depression, right in the middle of two World Wars,” he said.
“I’ve got property now, quite a bit of it. And I want people to know that you can better yourself.”
Woolf tries to focus on affordable homes when developing real estate, he said, and would like to do more specifically with low-income housing, although his ability to do so is currently limited by county regulations.
Organizations Woolf supports include Anchor House, which provides housing and other services for the local homeless population and especially homeless veterans.
“There are people in this county that are homeless, a lot of them,” Woolf said. “We had a person that froze to death here a couple, three years ago. So I’m concerned about the homeless. I’m concerned that we could take care of ourselves better than we do, if we would.”
Woolf also supports AGAPE with a $200 donation each month. He recently asked Randa Taylor, director of finance for the food pantry, how long he had been making the donations because he couldn’t remember exactly when he started.
“So she looked back and said ‘Well, you’ve been doing this since ‘08,’” Woolf said. “So, if my math serves me right, that’s well over $40,000 that I’ve given to the food bank.”
Clifton and his late wife Elaine had three children, Teresa, Lisa and Bill.
Karen Corder, who nominated Woolf as a Hidden Hero, was a freshman in high school when she moved to the area and was soon spending all the time she could at the Woolfs’ house.
“While he was working at the Guard, every year for Homecoming those kids made the floats out at the Guard and he was right there supporting all the kids, having fun,” Corder said. “He went to every sporting event, he went to every activity in town, him and Elaine both, and there was always fun and laughter at their house.”
There were also a lot of “little sprinkles of life lessons in there,” Corder added.
Military service is a big part of the Woolf family story. His daughter Teresa tragically passed away at the age of 59 in 2018, but before she did, “she organized a run for the Warriors,” Woolf said.
“And it’s a 5K, which I have done every time that it’s happened, and I’ve completed the course every time it’s happened. I completed the course last year,” he said. “I’m always the last person across. When they see me coming, they start taking everything down. But I complete it.”
Besides continuing to participate in the annual 5K in his nineties, Woolf also still enjoys walking around his neighborhood and visiting with the people he meets.
“Last night on my walk I wound up in a home eating a baked pie that one of the ladies in the neighborhood had baked and wanted me to taste-test it, so I tested it for her,” he said.
That is just one small example of the ways he has personally benefited from what was initially simply an impulse to help others, he said.
Once, he said, he was at home looking out his front window when he saw someone across the street with a crutch under his arm struggling to load a truck. Woolf went over to help the man, learning in the process that he was moving out the former resident’s belongings, because the former resident, who was blind, had to move into an assisted living facility.
Woolf asked if there was anything else he could do to help, and ended up taking care of his former neighbor’s cat for a period of time. Later, the house came up for sale and Woolf, having already established a relationship with the seller, bought it.
While he probably profited more in the long run from the interaction than the neighbor did, Woolf said, he did not go into it trying to make money.
“My concern is, when you can help, you should,” he said. “If you can help somebody, do it.”
Having grown up immersed in Woolf’s helping philosophy, his children, in turn, do what they can to assist him with some of the things he has begun to struggle with as he gets older. But he said he rejects their offers if they try to help too much, preferring to still mow his own grass and take out his own trash.
“As long as I can do what I am doing now, as long as I can help people, we can go on like this for however long it takes,” he said. Over a long life of giving back, Woolf doesn’t see any single charitable act as his lasting legacy. His approach of looking for win-win situations in the process of helping others, however, has contributed not only to his own success, but the betterment of his community.
“I haven’t done anything that I consider great, but I’ve done a lot of things that I like to look back on,” he said.
