FAIRFIELD – About 80 turned out Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 2, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fairfield Community Center, which hosted a free lunch at its building at 209 S. Court St.

Guests were treated to a buffet featuring cheeseburger pie, side dishes galore, and a delicious “birthday” cake to mark the occasion. Dr. Gary Roth entertained those in attendance with a performance on clarinet, and board member Kathy Horn shared snippets of the group’s 50-year history.

Horn said she began looking into the history of the Fairfield Community Center for a program she intended to give to the Questers Club, and that’s when she noticed that the club had turned 50 years old in 2023. After sharing this with the board, the members decided that a celebration was in order, and thus planned a free lunch open to the public.

The group’s original name was the Fairfield Senior Center, and it opened on Dec. 5, 1973 at 51 W. Washington Ave. in a building near the Carnegie Historical Museum, which at various times in its history had been a beauty school and the unemployment office. Horn said the cost of a lunch at the center was 75 cents, and the cost to ride the bus was 25 cents.

Horn said the group realized within a few years that it would need a building of its own, and in June 1979 announced a plan to build a center to host lunches and serve as a rental space for clubs and special occasions. The Fairfield Senior Center opened its doors on May 3, 1983.

Residents who visit the center will notice a giant mural on its north interior wall, which depicts the north side of the Fairfield square and neighboring Central Park. Horn said this was a project of then Fairfield High School art instructor Mark Shafer, who created the mural with his students to show how Fairfield looked in 1911.

Horn said that the building has been used for many things over the years, such as serving as a base to restore the Christmas decorations on the square, and hosting driver’s education courses led by Curt Hanson.

At the end of her talk, Horn spoke about all the groups that use the center now and some of the programs that are run from the building. She said three card clubs use the building weekly, and it hosts meetings of the Lions Club and PEO monthly. Indian Hills Community College runs a program from the building called “Ask a Teenager,” where 19 local high school students in the IHCC nursing program help seniors with technology, such as helping them to use phones and computers. In December, the center rented a van to take a group of seniors to see the Christmas lights in Mt. Pleasant.

Horn also took Tuesday’s talk as an opportunity to announce a change that Milestones Area Agency on Aging will implement to its weekday lunches. Milestones currently prepares lunches every weekday at the center, and serves them to guests in its dining room as well as packaging them for delivery to residents in Salem and Mt. Pleasant. However, Milestones will stop cooking the meals in Fairfield starting in February, and instead prepare the food in Oskaloosa and deliver it to Fairfield and the other towns.

Horn’s husband, Francis Horn, is the president of the club and the one who spearheaded the remodeling project undertaken at the center about two years ago. The project involved building an interior wall near the kitchen where the refrigerators and freezers could be placed so they would be closer for the kitchen staff and not part of the main dining room like they were before. The project also involved new floors, fresh paint on the walls, new furniture on the main floor and lower level, and new window treatments.

Francis worked as a building contractor, and retired in 2015. This gave him more time to devote to civic organizations like the Fairfield Community Center, and other board members especially appreciated the construction skills he brought to the role. Francis said he noticed a number of things about the building that he wanted to change, like the drop ceiling on the upper level that he said didn’t look nice.

“I couldn’t look at it anymore,” Francis said. “I said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this because it’s bad.’”

Though Francis was in charge of the project, he said he couldn’t have done it without the help of others such as Larry Keller, Dave Taft, Jim Salts, Pete Tollenaere and Dr. Gary Roth. He said Randy Zehr did a good job on the electrical work.

Francis said the pandemic hit the Fairfield Community Center hard because its rental income dried up during that time, and the group was facing dire financial straits. Luckily, the center has rebounded since then and now is renting space for reunions, anniversaries, graduations and lots of clubs that meet at the center.

“We’re trying really hard to get more community involvement,” Francis said.