KP Couple Donates $50,000 to Camp Seymour and Tom Taylor YMCA

In 2016, Chicago stockbroker George Hovany was invited to a Dead show at the Gorge Amphitheatre by a friend in Woodinville.

“I followed the Grateful Dead everywhere, even after Jerry died, but I’d never been to Washington.”

When he got home after a week, he told his wife, Pat, “We have to move to Washington. And so Pat says to me, ‘I’ve been saying that all this time. You never listen to me.’ ”

George, 74, and Pat, 75, found a house in Glencove and relocated in 2019.

“When we came here from Chicago, we obviously didn’t know anybody,” George said. They’d started house hunting in Woodinville, near their friends, but wanted a smaller place with some privacy. Their realtor recommended Gig Harbor.

“You don’t have these trees in Illinois, and here they’re everywhere,” George said. “I thought it was paradise. I still think that to this day. My house is in paradise. I think about how miserable our life would’ve been if we were still in Illinois.”

“We’d be killing each other,” Pat said.

One of their neighbors is YMCA Camp Seymour.

But George found the Tom Taylor Y in Gig Harbor first. “I needed a pool,” he said. “I’d already been swimming every day for 20 years. I lost 100 pounds, plus you tone your body. I see people my age that can hardly walk, and I’m running around and doing this, that, and the other. And I completely believe that it’s because of the swimming.”

“He was very buoyant at first,” Pat said.

“And unless you’re a complete introvert, you start meeting people at the Y,” he said. “Especially in the hot tub.”

George now serves on the advisory council board for Tom Taylor and, after swimming every morning, volunteers at Camp Seymour in the afternoons.

“You know what it does for the community,” George said. “I watch these kids learning how to swim, and I tell them sometimes to really listen to what the instructor says to you because swimming is something you’re gonna do the rest of your life. And then there’s all the other different things that go on over at Tom Taylor. You’ve seen the new park they have there now. And, oh, my God, the old people are going nuts playing pickleball.”

He added: “People should know that many medical insurance plans will pay for the YMCA. People might not know that they could be coming to the Y for free.”

Pat volunteers at Camp Seymour, too.

“We found out Pat was a nurse, and we grabbed her,” said Scotty Jackson, the senior executive director for camp services.

“I did a lot of different things, but my last job was pediatric neurology,” Pat said. “I retired when we moved.” Since that time, she has volunteered for the KP dental van, administered COVID vaccines during the pandemic, and now teaches yoga at The Mustard Seed Project, along with doing gardening and crafts there.

“Pat helped us for a long time that first summer doing check-in, back in 2019,” said Diane Jackson, Camp Seymour’s marketing and development director. “It’s 200 kids with lots of medication coming through, so she joined our health team to facilitate that.”

Scotty and Diane are married; they met working at YMCA Camp Campbell in the Santa Cruz Mountains 30 years ago. This is their 20th summer at Camp Seymour.

Pat also volunteered through the COVID years and afterward at Seymour, screening students and chaperones.

“We were helping support the COVID kids who were falling through the cracks,” Scotty said. “Every KP principal had a list of about 10 kids who hadn’t logged in at all yet (when classrooms were shut down). We called local folks from around here, and we wound up with about 36 kids. We thought we were doing it for about three weeks, and then in May one of the kids says to me, ‘Scotty, are we doing a yearbook?’ and I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, you’ve been here a whole year.”

“That was so gratifying,” Pat said. “Connecting the kids who didn’t have Wi-Fi, getting them all set up, and working with staff to stay in school, seeing where your money goes.”

“Recently, I said to Pat, ‘At some point, we have to give back to the community for all that this community has done for us,’ ” George said. “We went from complete unknowns to living a very good life here because of all the new friends we’ve met through the Y.”

On June 1, George and Pat gave Camp Seymour and the Tom Taylor YMCA $50,000.

“I made some investment decisions that turned out to be very good, and now gives us the opportunity to give the money to the YMCA, The Mustard Seed, and all the small, local places around here,” George said.

“We’re very happy with George’s gift,” Scotty said. “It’s leaving a mark forever. It’s a standalone endowment, but part of a larger plan. I think we’re at about $625,000 for the camp. This will go to scholarships here, the same as at Tom Taylor.”

“Part of that is every kid in the foster care system automatically gets a free membership to the Y, and it stays with them regardless of where they go, so their activities are consistent no matter what household they’re with,” Diane said.

“And that rolls over to getting those kids over here into camp. And camp changes people’s lives.”

2030 will be Camp Seymour’s 125th year in operation.