Complimentary Kindness at Discovery Shop

Lucy Aucella moves from furniture to kitchenware in seconds, hugging customers as they enter and kissing them goodbye for luck as they leave the American Cancer Society Discovery Shop in Northridge.

“She’s a tornado,” said co-worker Linda Scalise. “She goes through the place and takes over.”

On the Tuesdays and Saturdays when retired elementary school teacher Aucella volunteers, sales go up, said Jill Angel, manager of the resale shop that specializes in higher-quality furniture, clothes, decorations, jewelry, art and housewares. “We forget how old she is,” Angel said.

Aucella, a Reseda resident who turns 82 on May 4, said she learned about the Discovery Shop and started volunteering five years ago, when her husband Eddie’s prostate cancer was in remission. He has since died of a stroke.

Two weeks after his funeral, Aucella found out she too had cancer. It was caught and treated early, and has been in remission for four years.

Despite her husband’s death and her own painful chemotherapy, Aucella continued to volunteer at the store. “I knew I had to get out of the house and I had to keep going,” she said.

Aucella dresses impeccably each day she volunteers, often wearing a favorite white dress, stockings, heels and jewelry. Her dress and her manners come from her Italian mother, who raised her in Boston to be polite and gracious, almost in a Victorian way.

Aucella has a loyal following of customers. “Everyone who comes in has a hug and a kiss for her,” said Nadine Magee of Northridge, one of the regulars.

Taking Magee through the store, Aucella showed her what she would need for a cruise. “You’ll need a jacket like this,” said Aucella, who returned from a similar cruise last week. “It got windy on the way back.”

She also keeps a file box--with pictures of angels pasted on top--near the service counter. Inside are a couple of hundred index cards listing customers and what they’re looking for--a tall dresser, a cassette tape holder, even a samurai sword. When she finds an item, she calls the customer or sends them notes with rose petals in the envelope.

Customers come, not so much for the service, Aucella said, “but because I love them.”

Often the customers are shopping for emotional support. “People have walked in and said, ‘I’ve just been diagnosed,’ ” Angel said. “She’ll sit them down and talk to them.”

Then, drawing on her own experience, she will lay out what to expect from the treatments and explain how she survived. Then she gets a phone number and calls to see how they are doing, Angel said. It’s her compassion and hard work that made her the shop’s volunteer of the year for 1996, Angel said.

Regular customers, co-workers and boss know that the love of Aucella’s life is still Eddie. They talk of the way she keeps his picture on her piano at their Reseda home, always with fresh flowers. And she takes his picture with her on any trip.

“She says she’ll never get over him,” Scalise said.

“I’m still married to Eddie,” Aucella said. Her bond with him has been maintained in part because of the Discovery Shop. Two years ago, Aucella was working an arts sale and happened to stop at a table with jewelry on display.

Her eyes fell on a pin. It read, “EA--You are not alone.”

It was almost as if Eddie--initials EA--had slipped it onto the table for her to find. She bought it.

“I like to think that he’s watching me,” she said.