Hometown Hero - Norm Ira

This week’s Hometown Hero is Norm Ira of West Salem.

Norm was nominated by Noreen Holmes, the Director of the La Crosse County Aging Unit. Norm is a volunteer driver for the Aging Unit where he helps veterans and others get to their medical appointments all over Wisconsin. He regularly drives them to Tomah VA Medical Center, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and the University Hospital in Madison. He has also driven to Milwaukee several times; one time in order to get a patient to his 5am appointment, he left West Salem at 2 in the morning. Some appointments only require him to wake up at 4 am. Just last week he drove someone up to Eau Claire because he needed the specialized medical treatment only available there. It seems pretty clear to me why Noreen chose to honor this incredible man.

Norm doesn’t just drive people to their medical appointments. Noreen says that he regularly drives people down to Viroqua if they want to visit family and he’ll go anywhere that the Aging Unit needs. She says that he is a wonderful volunteer who really cares about helping others.

Norm got the idea to be a volunteer driver from a friend who drove for the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) and decided that it seemed like something fun to do. He has been driving with RSVP for 9 years and with the Aging Unit for 5 years. After retiring after 22 years as a groundsman for Vernon Electric, he felt like he had to do something, so he decided to be a driver. His favorite part of the job is getting to meet new and interesting people while he shepherds them around the state.

In addition to traveling around the state as a volunteer driver, Norm travels around the Midwest as a polka dancer. Three nights a week he dances and he goes wherever the polka fest may be, sometimes to Rochester, Ellsworth and even to Duncan, Iowa. He met his wife, Laura, while polka dancing, and while she can no longer dance with him, he still goes to polka dances every weekend. He and Laura have been married for 17 years; he has three children and 3 grandchildren and she has 2 sons and 4 grandchildren. And even though he has been a diabetic for 64 years, takes five shots of insulin a day and has to check his blood sugar levels before he drives, Norm still manages to go out of his way to help others in need.

So the next time you see a red Toyota Camry driving around town with an RSVP sign on the door (Norm laughs when he says that in the past two years he put 60,000 miles on his car), it is probably Norm with a patient on his way to a doctor’s appointment.

Congratulations to you, Norm! Keep up the good work and continue to be a Hometown Hero.

Hometown Hero is a weekly feature put together by Rep. Steve Doyle (D-Onalaska). If you have any suggestions of a Hometown Hero, send a short description of why you think this person should be a Hometown Hero and contact information of both you and the nominee to rep.doyle@legis.wisconsin.gov.