By Angela Satterlee
Linda Thorn is the winner of this year’s Dorothy Hilbert Award, which honors a female volunteer who exhibits the same passion, dedication, and devotion for volunteerism as did the late Dorothy Hilbert.
Linda is from a small town near West Bend, and she started volunteering for EAA around 23 years ago and fell in love with the work and the people she’s able to help. Linda started volunteering initially by accident. She used to attend AirVenture just to bring her sons up to see their uncle, but a friend of hers, Joe Schumacher, needed help in the new building for air operations. She could tell he was struggling for volunteers that year, so she offered to help out one day, and the rest was history. “Joe asked if I would come back and take on the position [as chairman of the building],” Linda said. “I love Joe Schumacher … and I just found myself saying yes.” Now she has found a true love for it and couldn’t imagine her life any other way.
Winning this award means a great deal to Linda. She dedicates a lot of her time to helping others, expecting nothing in return, but she is still forever grateful that she was chosen among so many other worthy women. “I don’t have words for it,” she said. “I can’t even feel the real emotion yet because I’m still trying to understand, because there’s so many people that have been up there for so many more years than me. And it means everything.”
Linda has worked her whole life in hospitality jobs and retail and has always had a passion for helping others. “When the performers come through the door of our AirVenture building, I treat them like a guest in my home,” she said. “They’re coming to see me. They need to be treated with respect and … [see] that they’re wanted there. And that’s just what I do. That’s their home too, and I am their host.”
Now Linda has fallen in love with the EAA team that she works so closely with. She’s made so many close friends, and at the end of the week when she has to say goodbye, she chooses not to. “It’s like a big family reunion every year,” she said. “I don’t go to the wind-down party at the end because I don’t like the goodbyes. I’m a very emotional person, and I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I can’t say goodbye to these people when they walk out the door on our last day. I say, ‘I’ll just see you next year.’ That’s just the way I have to leave it.”
“Everything I do up there, it is not for accolades, it’s not for thank-you’s,” Linda explains. “It’s not for attention. Everything comes from my heart. Everything I do, every word that I speak to anybody, is because I truly mean it.”
Linda says to everyone thinking about volunteering for EAA to “do it” even if it’s just for one year. She doesn’t believe that you need to be invested in aviation or be nuts about airplanes and pilots, because you’re volunteering to help something greater than yourself. “Give it one year,” Linda said. “And I don’t think you’ll lose. And I don’t believe you’ll walk away without gaining something.”