In her 2009 interview for The Peoplestown Project, Sister Marie (Mimi Bodell) recalled how supporters would scrape together resources for Emmaus House in the 1970s:
And Ginny Tuttle—her father was Judge Tuttle in Atlanta—was a volunteer who collected 3,000 books of green stamps so we could buy a bus. We bought one of those big Bluebird yellow new buses. One of the first trips the bus took was to Reidsville Prison. Austin [Ford] and Roche Heriot took turns taking the 12 hour round trip journey once a month.
This story (posted in the project’s original blog) prompted David Morath, a former staff member at Emmaus House to share his memories of Mrs. Tuttle:
Mrs. Tuttle was an amazing woman who made a lot of good things happen, Her collaboration with Sr. Mimi and the other Sisters of Notre Dame was always interesting.
Ginny had taken care of the logistics of getting a chartered planeload of people from Peoplestown to the GA coastline and she told me she asked one of the Sisters if she thought she could just pray these events into existence.
“Oh, no,” was the reply. “We never pray for things. We pray that God will send someone who can figure out how to do these things, and he sent you!”
On another occasion Mimi asked me to call Mrs. Tuttle to find where we could purchase a sponge mop. I asked her to repeat the request. She did and I asked her where she had been all her life. “In a convent”, she responded. We spared Ginny that call.
