Clearwater woman, 103, volunteered ‘because it was what you were supposed to do’

After her father died in 2002, Ali Korosy found a box of letters, thank-you notes and commendations in his Clearwater home from the decades he and her mother spent volunteering.

“Mom, why don’t you guys put these out?” Ali Korosy asked Sabine Korosy.

“She looked at me and she said, ‘Honey, that’s not why we do it,’” Ali Korosy said. “That’s the epitome of the Greatest Generation. She volunteered her entire life.”

Korosy, better known as Beanie, died Oct. 19 from natural causes. She was 103.

Dancing in the kitchen

Born in Marietta, Georgia, Sabine Brumby moved with her family to Clearwater in 1929. She graduated from Agnes Scott College and met her future husband, Fred Korosy, when a friend introduced them at a party.

“I think he proposed within nine months of meeting her,” Ali Korosy said. “Her reaction was, ‘Really? You really do want to marry me?’”

The couple married in 1955, and Korosy helped her husband run Sandy Bookstore in downtown Clearwater, adding her creativity to the store’s window displays. The couple had three daughters, Marianne, Ali and Isabel. They remember their dad coming home from work and dancing with their mom in the kitchen.

Housewives back then were expected to volunteer in their communities, Korosy told her daughters.

“But my mom didn’t do it because it was expected,” daughter Isabel Personette said. “She did it because that’s what she was supposed to do in life.”

Both their parents were like that, Ali Korosy said. They believed “you take care of your corner of the world.”

Beanie

The Korosys helped open Religious Community Services, now Hope Villages of America, in 1968. They drove people who needed rides to the doctor, set up a day care and located emergency housing.

The couple took middle-of-the-night calls from the Clearwater Police Department and drove victims of domestic violence to a shelter in St. Petersburg.

They helped get funding for Clearwater’s own shelter, The Haven of RCS, in 1981. (An award was named after the couple, which Korosy was not happy about. “We don’t do this to be recognized,” she told her daughters.)

In 1983, the couple was named Clearwater’s Neighbors of the Year by the Community Service Foundation. One woman remembered how “Beanie and some of her friends during World War II drove around picking up people for church and Sunday school who didn’t have gas,” the St. Petersburg Times reported that year.

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Korosy made up to 100 sandwiches a night for Clearwater’s cold-night shelter so people would have food the next day.

She taught Sunday school at Episcopal Church of the Ascension (and was the fun teacher who’d build things and let the kids destroy them to teach lessons) for 40 years.

Korsoy volunteered at Morton Plant Hospital as a runner until she was 93.

She didn’t sit still for long, liked to say she “had sufficient” to mean she had enough, sometimes indulged in jigsaw puzzles and pushed herself to take on work she found daunting.

Korosy earned her nickname, Beanie, because she was small — 5 feet, 1 inch tall at her tallest. Linda Amidei, former director of The Haven of RCS, knew Korosy for 30 years.

“She was tiny as she could be,” Amidei said, “but she was a giant when it came to getting things done and when it came to standing up for those that didn’t have others to stand up for them.”

Poynter news researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

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