Nov. 13, 2025
In my Sept. 26 comments, I focused on changes that may make it easier to keep the Forum’s website up to date. Those changes will affect almost no one. The following, however, will be instantly noticed by Forum regulars – and they may be delighted with the change.
After the Forum’s Dec. 9 meeting, I will stop arriving 90 minutes early to set up the room and brew the coffee. Funds now in the Coffee and Action Funds will be combined, the retail value of all unused coffee and condiments will be added, and the total in cash will be placed in the Christmas Party donation basket on Dec. 16. I will decide later whether to archive or delete the weekly online records of Coffee Fund revenue and expenses that date back to the summer of 2003.
In that year of 2003, the late Dr. Gyasi Foluke was casting about for a way to make coffee at the old Lasalle Street library where the Forum landed for a few weeks after the McDonald’s Cafeteria at I-85 closed. He rumaged around, and found a castoff drip coffee pot in a cabinet. Three weeks later, he said he had had enough of brewing coffee, and I volunteered to carry on. The pots have grown larger with the attendance, decaf was added, and after an outcry over what styrofoam cups are doing to the environment, paper cups replaced styrofoam despite their higher unit cost. Amidst change, one constant has survived:
Over the years, veritable legions of people went to the coffee table to prepare the late Sarah Stevenson’s morning coffee. They all learned her preferences, and even Ms. Sarah seemed to enjoy the humor that she was known to take a bit of coffee with her creamer.
I have bought many coffee urns since 2003. Some were disposed of after their heating elements failed. At least two met a fiery demise when the portion of the cord nearest the housing gave way from constant bending. I am down to one pot. The one shown at the top of the page was left by a Belmont Center caterer four years ago. After it sat on the kitchen counter for a month, I cleaned it up and put it in a cabinet hoping that its owner would return for it. To make it through the end of the year, I’ll continue to use it, then put it back in the cabinet,
In the last number of months, as my energy was at a low ebb from cancer drugs, a number of facilitators and other regulars have cleaned the pots while I put the livestreaming equipment away. You know who you are, and I am grateful to all of you.
The future is not mine to define. Facilitators have been talking about bringing in boxed coffee if they can find one or more volunteers who will commit to picking up the coffee in a reliable and timely way. Or perhaps someone, underwhelmed by the opportunity to endow a chair, might endow a hospitality table instead. Meanwhile, if the task of ferrying coffee to the hospitality table interests you, please e-mail Laura McClettie.