Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again. And when you do, it’s not easy to leave.
“I’m excited, but at the same time I’m sad,” said Capt. Sue Haslett, who returned to Emporia five years ago to run the Salvation Army with her husband, Capt. Mark Haslett.
Next week, the Hasletts will move to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to run the Salvation Army there.
“Emporia’s my home town,” she said. “I’m excited but at the same time I’m sad. I’m okay as long as I’m busy. When I stop and think about ...” She left the sentence unfinished.
Her mother, Mary E. Smith, and several of her siblings live in Emporia, which exacerbates the natural reluctance of leaving friends and moving on. Haslett said would like to take her mother with her to Iowa, but the rest of the family disagrees.
“I kept telling her that I was going to handcuff her and blindfold her and take her screaming and kicking,” Sue Haslett said with a laugh. “She’s still too healthy to do that.”
The Hasletts will be taking over a large operation in a much-larger city. Cedar Rapids’ population is about 120,000. The Salvation Army there has a total of about 2,000 volunteers; its youth basketball program has more than 300 teams. The Iowa appointment definitely is a promotion.
“That’s what they’re telling me,” Mark Haslett said. “They keep saying that, I think, to make me feel better, but I was happy here.”
The Hasletts will miss the “sense of homeness” they found in Emporia, Mark Haslett said.
“I really like the community support that we have here. If we have a need, we just kind of make it known and it gets done,” he said. “There’s a good spirit of cooperation between the groups in the community. ... Sometimes when you get in a larger city, there’s more anonymity.”
The Hasletts are leaving behind a long list of accomplishments for their replacements, Capts. Jeremiah and Hope Burriss, who are moving here from Cadillac, Mich. They grew up in the Wichita and Kansas City areas, “so to them it’s going to be like coming home, too.
“I think that they’ll really fit right in,” Mark Haslett said. “They’re like local people. They’re young, they have three children at home.”
Haslett said that he hopes he and his wife are leaving the Salvation Army here in better shape than when they arrived, five years ago — to the day — that they are leaving.
The Hispanic outreach program they started continues to grow, and the board of directors is getting stronger as time goes on. Youth activities are burgeoning and the summer day care program is flourishing. Having all those children in programs has spilled over into another area, and many of them are attending church at the citadel.
The Hasletts have overcome some building repairs and property issues the came up, like building a $10,000 ramp to the citadel and having the building re-roofed at a cost of $18,000. Then, there was the fire at the Salvation Army Thrift Store on Oct. 16, 2006, which caused extensive smoke damage and some structural problems.
“Those things are challenging but nothing insurmountable,” Mark Haslett said.
Sue Haslett has only one regret about her time in Emporia.
“We came with the expectation we were going to build a new building, at least leave it for the Emporia people,” she said.
They looked at property, but were not able to find the right spot to fit the Salvation Army needs. She would like to have been able to stay until that had been accomplished, but the couple are ready and willing to go where they are needed, even if it means leaving Emporia.
The silver lining in Iowa will be its proximity of some of the Haslett’s children.
“We’ve got six kids so they’re scattered all over,” she said. “I’m kind of excited because we’ll be only four hours from our son in Minnesota.” Other family members live in Chicago, Geneseo, Ill., and Muscatine, Iowa.
“But I sure will miss Emporia,” she said. “You don’t know how much you miss a place until you come back to it. Emporia’s a beautiful city, a kind and caring community.”
The Hasletts will be guests of honor at a farewell reception from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday at the citadel’s annex, 327 Constitution St. The event is open to the public.