By Vic Monaco, Managing Editor
HIGHTSTOWN This house doctor is making a new kind of call, free of charge.
Mitch Dorum, of Hagemount Avenue, can be seen nowadays painting borough fire hydrants.
“I’m a veteran and I’m retired,” said the 76-year-old, when asked how he came about his new venture. “I always wanted to do something for the borough, and I figure volunteers are hard to come by and wanted to become one.”
So, he said, he decided to call the town’s Public Works director.
“I called Larry Blake and said, “‘How about I paint them because they look terrible?’ And he said yes.”
The work is not something Mr. Dorum is totally unfamiliar with.
“You may laugh at this but I’m what you call a house doctor,” he said. “I do painting, carpentry, mason work, all the little jobs.”
“Little” may apply to the height of his latest canvases but not to the task at hand. He said there are about 130 hydrants in the borough, and they will require ýPage=001 Column=001 OK,0000.00þ
different colors, based on their water pressure.
“The hot weather got me at one point,” said the former state employee who started his hydrant painting about three weeks ago. “I’m doing them periodically. There’s no set time to get them done.”
Councilman Larry Quattrone, who is the Public Works liaison, is just happy Mr. Dorum decided to help.
“If more people volunteered their time like that, it would save the borough money,” he said. “Mitch is very, very borough conscious.”
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Born in the Bronx, Mr. Dorum moved to Hightstown in the 1950s. Volunteerism, he says, is nothing new to him or his wife. She was a longtime rescue squad member in East Windsor and he was a member of the local Fire Police and a volunteer Army Ranger in the Korean War.
He’s also a veteran of 50 years of marriage.
So what does his wife think of his new volunteer role?
“We made an agreement when we first got married: ‘When I go some place, you don’t say nothing. When you go some place, I don’t say nothing.’”
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