Citizen of the Year believes in Affton

By BILL MILLIGAN

For the Mail Call

She’s lived in Affton all her life, but not until this year has Christine Klinger been named Citizen of the Year by the Affton Chamber of Commerce.

Klinger, formerly Christine Ruemker, 42, is a 1979 graduate of Bishop DuBourg High School.

She is so intent on preserving Affton’s way of life that she changed her full-time work schedule at St. Mary’s Hospital’s Coronary Care Unit to part time.

“Affton is an older suburb,” Klinger said. “It’s showing its age a little bit. There is not a lot of vacant housing and Affton needs to make sure that a lot of its resources are returned in the sense of county services such as road repair and sewer maintenance. We need to make sure that our tax dollars aren’t just going out to build roads to take people out of Affton.”

To help in that regard, Klinger is chairman of the Affton Community Betterment Association’s Housing Committee and is active with both the St. Dominic Savio Parish Community Involvement Mission and the Metropolitan Congregations United, or MCU.

“It’s a grass-roots based organization made up of 75 congregations in the St. Louis region,” Klinger said. “We’re called MCU Isaiah. We took it from a quote from Isaiah: ‘You should be the repairer of the streets to dwell in,’ or something like that.”

Isaiah consists of representatives from eight congregations: St. Dominic Savio, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Zion Uni-ted Methodist, Seven Holy Founders, St. Timothy’s, Notre Dame, Most Precious Blood and Queen Of All Saints.

“We officially formed in November 2001,” she said. “We’ve developed two task forces. One’s a housing task force and one’s an economic development task force.

“We work with our elected officials to improve our community. One of the things we’ve identified is code enforcement and absentee landlords, in Lemay and in Affton primarily. It’s everywhere. We’re trying to get those funds released by the empowerment zone to fund the cleanup at the Na-tional Lead site.”

Klinger’s work has put her face to face with desperate poverty that many residents wouldn’t believe exists in south county.

During a recent housing inspection she found more than 20 families crowded into rooms above an old retail facility.

The building had no heat and sanitary sewers had backed up into living areas. Two-year-old children were playing within reach of stovetops glowing red with heat.

“The people living in the building were illegals and I suppose they couldn’t afford to complain,” she said. “The county condemned the building and the police moved everyone out, but once they left, everyone just went back in the building.”

A registered nurse, Klinger said it’s hard to accept those conditions in the community in which she grew up.

“With all my community activities I’ve scaled back my work hours so that I could devote the time I needed to my community efforts,” she said. “It was my intention, always, to go back to full time. We’ll see if things slow down a little bit so I can go back to full time.”

When she’s not helping crack down on absentee landlords, Klinger teaches cardiopulmonary resuscitation classes for area youth groups.

“I’ve always thought kids should be prepared for emergencies as well as adults,” she said. “I’m giving them the knowledge and skills to handle situations.”

As a nurse, she’d like to see more families talk about end-of-life and critical-care issues before they face a crisis.

“People who haven’t had that sort of discussion always seem to struggle as far as resuscitation and how aggressive their therapy should be,” Klinger said.

When she’s not helping other people and her community, Klinger said she likes to fish and read newspapers and magazines.

“But I don’t have as much time as I would like to for those things,” she said.

She seems genuinely uncomfortable with the title Citizen of the Year.

“It’s hard for me to talk about myself and be in the spotlight. Being Citizen of the Year I get to ride in the parade. Other-wise, I don’t know of any other perks. There was a very nice banquet they had.”

As far as getting a bully pulpit to speak out about issues in which she believes?

“I was speaking out long before they named me Citizen of the Year,” Klinger noted.