On Monday, June 10, Shillington realtor Conrad Vanino received The John Updike Society’s second Distinguished Service Award—an 8×10” plaque thanking him “for his invaluable help acquiring and converting The John Updike Childhood Home into a museum.”

Vanino (pictured below with society co-founder Dave Silcox and curator Maria Mogford) helped the society go through proper channels and worked pro bono. He continues to serve the society behind the scenes, maintaining a lock box on the property so work crews can enter and checking on the house several times per day. Vanino is also in the process of looking for a suitable tenant for the annex added by Dr. Hunter, who lived in the house after the Updikes. The society has divided the annex so that three rooms of the building used for patient exams can be rented as office space to help cover the expenses of maintaining the house. The doctor’s office will be used as a gift shop, and the waiting room will be the educational room, for watching videos or for class presentations.

Vanino is a lifelong resident of the Shillington area who has served on Borough Council for over 30 years and is also on the board of the Shillington Lions Club and the board of Crime Alert Berks. He is a member of the Shillington Business Association and a graduate of Governor Mifflin High School. Like many Shillington youngsters, he learned to swim in the pond that provided the water supply for the poorhouse Updike wrote about, just blocks away from the house at 117 Philadelphia Avenue.

It’s not the first award for Vanino, who was also honored by the National Association of Realtors, the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors, the Reading Berks Association of Realtors, the Pennsylvania Borough Association, and Crime Alert Berks.

In accepting the plaque from society co-founder Dave Silcox, who was Updike’s contact in Shillington, Vanino said he believes in doing things to help the community. He’s not alone in that department. Civic leaders invited to an open house to see the property in its “before” condition—prior to Habitat for Humanity of Berks County volunteers tearing out carpets, tiles, and add-ons that compromised the integrity of the original dwelling— voiced similar sentiments. “Call me if you need anything” was the refrain of the evening, as members of the borough council, the local library, the Shillington Business Association, and Alvernia University mingled in the dining room.

With no furniture in the house yet, the open house refreshments were a Coleman cooler full of iced teas, water, and sodas, and paper plates full of cookies and local pretzels arranged on an end table left behind by the previous owners.

In addition to hosting the open house, while he was in Shillington for four days society president James Plath met with various people to talk about the house and the 2014 conference at Alvernia. With curator Maria Mogford (pictured above) he gave the society’s second biggest donor a tour of the house, and after several walk-throughs with Tim Daley and Russ Poper of Habitat, everyone agreed that this summer the focus will be on “deconstruction”—tearing everything out—and that next summer the restoration will begin.

The first Distinguished Service Award was presented in 2010 to James Yerkes “for his important contributions to Updike scholarship through The Centaurian.”