After eight weeks in Baltimore, Florence and John Richter will go home to Haddonfield, N.J., tomorrow -- but, in a way, they will be leaving home.
Hope Lodge, a 26-room free facility where cancer patients and their caregivers may stay during treatment, has become an unexpected refuge during John Richter's battle with prostate cancer. The sojourn will stay with the patient and his wife long after what they hope is the last dose of radiation.
After closing for three months last summer, the lodge has become homier since a $500,000 renovation added new carpet to the lobby, spiffed up the library and added more handicapped-accessible rooms. The renovated facility, near Lexington Market in West Baltimore, will be officially rededicated at a luncheon and ceremony today.
Already, Richter, 72, and his wife are looking for excuses to return to the newly comfortable lodging when they return to Johns Hopkins Hospital in three months for further evaluation. They say that besides being free, it offered solace and companionship that would be unavailable in a standard hotel.
"This is the greatest place on earth," Florence Richter said. "I want to see everyone again. It sounds strange to say, but we will miss them."
The nonprofit facility is one of 17 in the United States and Puerto Rico operated by the American Cancer Society that provide free rooms for people receiving cancer treatments.
The grounds of the lodge are being named the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Campus of Hope, in honor of a $500,000 grant from the foundation set up by the couple -- $300,000 of which went to the renovation.
A courtyard meditation garden has been landscaped, with new plantings and benches, courtesy of money raised at a golf tournament in honor of sportswriter John Steadman, who died of cancer last year. A plaque that Steadman received when he was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame has been donated by his family and will be placed in the garden.
For the rooms of longer-term patients, double mattresses have arrived, donated in memory of a former occupant who later died.
Patients come from all over the world to stay at the lodge, said manager Karen Seaberry.
Jane Tesar, 43, of Berlin, Md., who has been at the lodge since it reopened in September, has collected all of her fellow residents' addresses. When she heads home Monday with her mother, Barbara Phillips, Tesar will miss the communal meals they planned and the stories they shared in the refurbished lobby, with its warm, salmon-colored carpet and fireplace.
"Everybody acts like one big, happy family here," said Tesar, who has been treated for lung cancer at the nearby University of Maryland medical complex.
"We are going to miss everybody."