Loads of Wash Yield $1 Million Legacy to benefit Outreach Ministries in California
Episcopal News Service. August 31, 1995 [95-1216]
Robert McCann
(ENS) I took the streetcar to Noe Street, my destination a locked-up public laundry housed on the street level of a three-story Victorian apartment building.
The building is in the Castro, a neighborhood with a jumble of tree-lined streets, houses in all sorts of conditions, vacant lots, small businesses and cafes.
As appointed executor, I had come to go through the apartment of a woman I had never met: a non-church-going woman who had left the Episcopal Diocese of California a $1 million endowment to be used for outreach ministries.
While I fumbled with the unfamiliar keys to let myself in, passers-by asked lots of questions: "When's the laundromat opening?" "Hey, is the place up for sale?" "I hear the church is getting all of her money."
Questions came from long-time residents, shopkeepers, homemakers, retirees, gays and lesbians, teenage panhandlers, the street people who populate the area. They wanted to know what was going to happen to one of the hubs of their neighborhood, the place known mostly as the Noe Street Wash & Dry, whose owner of 30 years, Margaret Frances Wosser, had been found dead in her upstairs apartment a few days earlier.
Wosser died May 22 in her bathtub from an apparent heart attack. She was found after neighborhood friends called police because she hadn't opened her laundry or answered her doorbell.
The business's 7 a.m.-to-11 p.m., seven-days-a-week regimen set the pace for this Castro neighborhood. It was more than a place to spin and tumble. This 79-year-old self-made businesswoman had created a safety net for folks to drop into.
She was the kind of person who, when her accountants told her she should advertise more to offset taxes, decided instead to throw an annual Christmas raffle for her patrons. Wosser also bought most of the raffle items, things like VCRs and television sets. And the party's menu was always pizza.
"What other laundromat did I ever go to that had an annual party?" said Tony Costa, who did his laundry there for more than 20 years.
When I arrived at the top of the steep stairs that led to her three-bedroom apartment on the second floor I wasn't quite prepared to find so many clues to her generous life, such as a response from a local university for her annual $5,000 gift and a certificate endorsing her as "volunteer of the year."
Here was a woman of many faces. Patrons at the Cafe Fleur across the street remember her as "the old lady who swept the sidewalk daily all the way down the block." One washer called her "a curmudgeon with a soft side." And everyone who knew her at all called her first, and foremost, a kind-but-tough businesswoman.
Wosser, a baptized and confirmed Episcopalian from Grand Island, Nebraska, never attended church in the memory of anyone who knew her in San Francisco. But when her only child was dying of AIDS in the 1980s, it was the Episcopal Church that was kind to him.
So through an extraordinary gesture, written in 1990 through the diocesan office of planned giving, she set in motion a $1 million endowment to help the diocese help the homeless, people in alcohol and chemical treatment programs, inner-city children, people with AIDS, prison inmates and the homeless. Some call it a laundry list of what she deemed important.
Much of the largesse came from quarters, daily rolls of quarters from the laundry that, in a lifetime of careful saving, made a million for the marginalized. Her gift will go on because the principal will be preserved and provide money every year.
She also left smaller sums to the San Francisco Zoo, three of the city's museums and to the public library.
Although the laundry eventually will be sold, it was such a vital place for the community that the diocese will reopen it in the interim as soon as it can be assured that the liability insurance is paid. It's a way that the church can exercise good stewardship in the neighborhood.
Since Wosser made her money and spent her life at the Wash & Dry, it also seemed appropriate for her friends to celebrate her life there with a memorial service. The June 13 event attracted 75 people, a television news team and reporters from two daily newspapers.
A friend who talked about Wosser suggested "she wouldn't have been caught dead in a church" so we saved her from that fate. Her friends and charitable beneficiaries saluted her generosity and kind spirit in the midst of her Maytag washers and Speed Queen dryers.
No one was asked to prepare the place for the service, but her friends didn't let her down. They showed up with flowers, candles and a linen cloth to turn the linoleum-topped folding table into an altar.
Oh yes, and someone also brought lots and lots of pizza.
![[thumbnail: Surprise Legacy Will Supp...]](/e-archives/ENS/photographs/thumbnails/95-1216_thb.jpg) |