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contemporaries made,” she answers without hesitation. “Millions of other seniors have lost their portfolios, their pensions, and their jobs. I, on the other hand, have an independent, established business.” Besides, she added, “I’m honoring my brain and children’s brains rather than just worrying about the marketplace. But I’m not in this just to diddle my brain. I’d love to be free of money worries. I confess I covet nice clothes. And perhaps by some measures, I am not successful Y-E-T. But I am succeeding in the process. It is all a journey, sometimes a lifelong journey! While I am learning and refining the line, and increasing sales, I am succeeding. I am getting closer and closer to making the kind of income that allows me to grow my company, build financial security, and be of help to others beginning businesses. I’m paying it forward. What keeps me going, in addition to more sales? The universal ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from kids, the praise from all quarters for the products, and offers of licensing deals.” Sooner or later, she is certain, the right one will come along.

BARBARA AND IRA SMITH

Recycling Lives

“These have been the best years of my life.”

Ira Smith was fielding questions in the middle of the warehouse filled with rows of secondhand sofas, chairs, dressers, and other household goods. “Where are the beds?” “Where are the linens?” “Where are the microwaves?” He is a genial man and answered each query warmly and efficiently, mixing a host’s welcome and a ring-master’s élan.

Ira’s wife, Barbara, was standing at a counter just inside the warehouse’s steel double doors. She was busy logging the increasingly steady flow of things people were carrying out to their waiting cars, vans, and rental trucks: beds, bedding, cribs, car seats, clocks, china, sofas, settees, stemware, and flatware, as well as desks, tables, rugs, vacuums, sewing machines, televisions, stereos, toaster ovens, coffee-makers, vases, artwork, and assorted knickknacks. There was even the occasional bagel toaster. “I guess our price is right,” Barbara said.

That is because there are no prices. Everything at the Household Goods Recycling Ministry, as it was then still called, was free. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that business was up by 30 percent in the midst of the nation’s worst economic downturn in decades. Or that, year after year, business has increased at that pace at the unlikely all-volunteer operation that Barbara and Ira started 1990 when they were sixty. (It has changed its name, replacing “Ministry” with “of Massachusetts” to avoid unwarranted conjectures about its religious nature.)

More than two hundred agencies, from the American Red Cross to the Veterans Administration, operating out of some five hundred offices, have grown dependent on the charitable enterprise over the last nineteen years. After quite literally carrying HGRM on their own backs for the first decade, the Smiths are only too happy to boast about the 220 active volunteers who have helped to build and expand HGRM over the last decade. Annually, it now serves about three thousand individuals and families from Acton and sixty surrounding communities, including Boston, Boxboro, Lowell, Lawrence, and Worcester. By and large, the clients are recovering from domestic violence, drug addiction, mental illness, financial failures, and homelessness. They are making transitions from shelters, rehabilitation programs, and halfway houses back to lives in their own homes. Political refugees, from El Salvador to Iraq, have also received assistance from HGRM. The acronym is often pronounced as Hug Room to reflect the contagion of warm embraces between its beneficiaries and the volunteers who staff the organization, including the Smiths. And why not? The nonprofit furnishes the equivalent of about fifty apartments a month. In 2008, it distributed more than twenty-seven thousand pieces of furniture and about ten thousand boxes of small household goods, worth an estimated $1,178,000.

Not bad, considering that when Barbara and Ira began giving away furniture and