Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef delivered the following address May 10 at the Community Service Awards luncheon that honored 147 students, staff and student organizations for their 80,536 documented hours of service this past year:

You've shown that, on this campus, community service is truly a way of life. I've been on many a campus, and, in my experience, there's no other campus community that feels a greater sense of commitment to making a positive difference in others' lives … or, I suspect, gains greater satisfaction from the experience.

Student volunteers have told me in the past how their service really gives meaning to their lives and how amazed they are at what a small group of people can accomplish in a short amount of time.

In fact, it wasn't that long ago that I was in this very room, attending a student-organized charity event called "Woven with Warmth."

Its handful of organizers were amazed to see nearly 300 students, staff and community members respond to their call to come crochet, knit and sew blankets and scarves for homeless people in Davis. Before the night was over, they had created more than 60 blankets, 35 scarves, 25 beanies, and five sets of mittens and gloves.

I know all of you have similar stories to tell of community needs and of individual responses, of how you've been moved and enriched through your volunteerism.

When Laura [Human Corps Student Manager Laura Seaman] asked me to speak today, she suggested I might share with you the imprint that community service has made on my own life.

I'd like to tell you about two formative experiences for me — one in grade school and one in junior high, one ostensibly about coin-collecting and the other about eye glasses.

First, like many kids, I had paper routes when I was growing up, from about grades 4 through 7. In the old days, you didn't just deliver the paper; you also collected subscription money from the people on your route.

And they invariably paid you with cash — generally with coins.

So, not surprisingly, I became quite interested in the more unusual coins circulating then — for example, Indian head pennies, Morgan dimes, silver dollars and so on — and appreciated that my paper route gave me an opportunity to start a nice collection (even though coin collecting wasn't a particularly popular pastime then).

One of the people on my route was an elderly woman who lived by herself and was in poor health. She had two sons but they never came to visit her. Her only company was her dog.

She paid me one day, including an old coin — a nickel, as I recall. I was looking closely at it, and for a brief moment we talked about coins — also a passion of hers.

Pretty soon, I started regularly visiting her at the end of my paper route, about three times a week.

Ostensibly I was there to talk about coins, but it was clear in my own mind that my company was helping to ease this woman's loneliness. She really enjoyed these visits and would be disappointed if I couldn't come.

After about a year, I didn't find her home one day — which was very odd, since her illness prevented her from leaving the house. It turned out that she had died — quite a sobering realization for someone my age.

What I also realized was how much I had grown to appreciate her company. Her gift to me some 50 years ago was an understanding of the reciprocal nature of service — the recognition that all benefit and all are enriched.

The second story I want to briefly share with you dates back to seventh grade when I discovered just how nearsighted I was and just how badly I needed glasses.

A classmate had just gotten new glasses and left his old glasses on the windowsill. I put them on and was flabbergasted at what I could see — all of a sudden, for example, the leaves on the trees were distinctly visible instead of being a blur of green. I'll bet there are near sighted people in this room who remember that experience.

Well, my parents couldn't afford to buy me glasses for a while, though.

By the time I was in 10th grade, I finally had them — but my earlier experience with the cast-off glasses had stayed with me.

I thought that, just like me, there must be a lot of people who needed glasses but couldn't afford to buy them. And there must be a lot of old glasses sitting around in drawers at home as their owners replaced them with new prescriptions.

"Shouldn't we gather all those old glasses together and see if others could use them?" I thought.

That first year I gathered together 11 pairs of glasses and took them to a place where people were served free meals.

The people in charge there were puzzled and asked, "Now what do you expect us to do with these?"

Just make people aware they're available, I said. Those glasses all went in about two days. The next year, I had a little help and we collected 30 pairs.

The following year, I was in college but still involved in this effort, which had now expanded from my high school to local church groups.

That year we collected 110 pairs of glasses. These kinds of programs are much more common now but they were quite unusual back in 1958. ...

I understand that this year's six staff awardees have contributed nearly 2,600 hours of community service for such worthy organizations as the Girl Scouts, the Cross Cultural Center, the ALS Association, Flying Samaritans, the MIND Institute, United Way, Special Olympics, the Katrina Relief Fund, the East Oakland Youth Development Foundation, the UC Davis Children's Hospital, and Birch Lane Elementary School in Davis.

That's a remarkable demonstration of the selfless caring and concern that have long characterized the dedicated staff who, day in, day out, serve our campus — and also our surrounding community ... You make me and the campus so proud. We couldn't ask for better ambassadors and our community couldn't ask for better friends.