FROM VICTIM TO VICTOR

By JON ANDERSON

For the third year in a row, Temple Wells will represent Trussville in the Ms. Senior Alabama pageant.

She’ll compete as Ms. Senior Trussville on June 10 at Oak Mountain High School against 12 other women ages 60-69.

Kim Crawford-Meeks, the pageant director, said Wells is an amazing woman and an incredible asset to the Ms. Senior Alabama organization and to the Trussville community.

“She has been an integral part of implementing our mission of volunteerism, encouraging other seniors that they have a purpose, and always has a light in her heart and smile,” Crawford-Meeks said.

Wells, 66, has lived in Trussville about 18 years but has family ties to the city that date back to the 1940s, she said.

Her grandparents and her mother lived in Trussville’s Cahaba Project briefly, and when she and her husband moved to Trussville, they chose a house that — unbeknownst to her at the time — was very close to her mother’s former home.

Wells said she loves living in a city with a history as rich as Trussville and with such a patriotic spirit. Both her father and her son served in the National Guard, and her son was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, so the military has a soft place in her heart.

She also spent 22 years with the U.S. Selective Service, which keeps a list of men ages 18 to 25 in case an emergency requires a rapid deployment of the armed forces, and served as chairwoman of the North Alabama Board.

Wells grew up in Homewood through junior high school and then moved to Bluff Park and graduated rom Berry High School in 1975.

She got a job as a secretary in the personnel department at Central Bank of Birmingham, got married and moved with her husband to Marietta, Georgia, for about four years. She then moved to Alabaster for a couple of years while going through a divorce and took a job as the resident manager and leasing agent for Arboretum Apartments in Vestavia Hills.

She met her second husband, Glenn Wells, in 1983, and they married in 1985 and settled in Clay for about 20 years before moving to Trussville.

Wells worked brief stints as a secretary for her father’s accounting firm, a financial services company and a law firm, and as a substitute teacher for both the Jefferson County and Trussville school systems.

She was very involved with the activities of her five children, including band, sports, cheerleading and Boy Scouts, and she served on a community advisory board for the Jefferson County Board of Education and the PTA board at Hewitt-Trussville Middle School.

to represent Trussville at Ms. Senior Alabama

Wells also has been very active in civic life. She helped push to get a severe weather siren in Clay and a traffic light at Clay Elementary School and was involved in getting a log cabin moved to the school to help with history lessons. She also helped push for extra paramedics to be hired for the Center Point Fire District, which provides fire protection for the Clay community, and helped organize the first Clay Hay Day to raise money to pay for a defibrillator for the fire district, she said.

Wells was active in the push for the incorporation of Clay in 2000 and served as chairwoman of the city’s Board of Zoning Adjustments for a while. She also served on the vestry at Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Trussville for several years and was on The Women’s Committee of 50 in Trussville.

Her husband retired as the police chief in Argo in January, and she’s hoping she won’t have to go back to work, she said. However, while she considers herself to be in the “fourth quarter” of her life, she isn’t done serving, she said.

She has raised money to fight Alzheimer’s disease and still advocates for Compassion Ranch, a ranch in Calera that provides care for abandoned animals such as horses, ponies, donkeys, dogs, cats and goats and runs character education programs.

She also has joined in service projects with other women who have participated in Ms. Senior Alabama, going to bring cheer to people in assisted living centers and nursing homes, she said.

She has loved being involved with Ms. Senior Alabama, she said. “All of us are in our 60s or 70s, and we all have similar things in common,” she said. “It’s just fun. We are having a good time.”

At their age, there are certain things they can’t do like they formerly did, she said. Wells has had back surgery and couldn’t walk for four months due to a hip problem, but with years of therapy, she’s able to keep going, she said.

“You just have to keep moving,” Wells said. “Sometimes you have to ask for help, and that’s OK. Don’t let that pride sneak in there.”

Wells said she’s had to overcome some difficult things in her life. Raising children as a single mom for a while was tough, but with the help of her parents, friends and God, she made it through that time, she said.

More personally, she was raped by an intruder at her parents’ home when she was 20, and it took two to three years to get over that, she said.

“I was a victim, but I didn’t have to stay there,” Wells said. “There are a lot of people with a victim mentality. They don’t need to be a victim. They need to be a victor.”

Her mother started a rape crisis center after that incident, and Wells herself still actively promotes ways for women to be vigilant to help keep that from happening to them, handing out whistles and safety tips.

“That took a lot of time to overcome that, but I did, and I really think God’s got my life in His hands,” she said.

For more about the Ms. Senior Alabama pageant, go to mssenioralabama.com.