Mike Hughes received the President's Call to Service Award Tuesday from Dennis Spurgeon, the U.S. Department of Energy acting under secretary. The award acknowledged his nearly 7,000 hours of community service, which have helped hundreds of people live and thrive in Gilroy.

Hughes has been described as genuine, honest and patient. He has been compared to a handyman in a Norman Rockwell painting - bathed in a golden light, the embodiment of neighborliness. He has even been accused of underestimating the amount of hours he has actually served on behalf of the community.

However, the consensus among friends, supervisors and fellow volunteers is clear - whether buttering more than a thousand loaves of bread to raise money for the high school basketball team, helping to clean up sawdust after an adult education woodshop class or controlling traffic after an accident, Hughes does the thankless work that needs to get done and never complains about it.

The accidental teacher

Community service was something Hughes never meant to do. However, it is something he did readily and easily.

His involvement in volunteering started about 40 years ago, when he signed up to take a woodshop class for adults offered through Gilroy High School. Having already had experience with woodworking tools, Hughes found himself dispensing advice to classmates as they stood in line. His thinking was, "I know how to use the saw, I'll show you how to use the saw," he said.

Within a year, he was spending more time helping other people with their projects than working on his own. The patience he brought to his teaching earned him the respect of the class, said Lucy Gori, owner of Town and Country Fashion. Hughes helped her make planter boxes during woodshop classes in the late 1990s.

"We always looked forward to him coming to class," she said.

Hughes acted as an assistant to the teacher four hours each week, nine months per year for 34 years - the equivalent of 4,896 hours. His volunteering career, despite an inconspicuous start, managed to outlast even the woodshop class, canceled in 2000.

However, by then Hughes had already gotten himself involved with several organizations. In 1981, he volunteered to prepare and sell garlic bread at the Gilroy Garlic Festival to raise money for his two daughters' basketball team at GHS.

If Hughes had been left undisturbed, he would have never received the award. He would have kept volunteering without totaling up the hours, he said.

His humility and community service was too great, however, to pass unnoticed by many of his colleagues, including Neil Calder, the director of communications for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where Hughes has worked for the past six years.

While Calder had noticed Hughes' attendance at multiple volunteer activities, he realized the extent of Hughes' reliable work ethic during an event last fall. The center was hosting a number of U.S. Congress members and university heads for a groundbreaking and, when plans fell through, Calder asked Hughes to construct a platform for the dignitaries to walk across.

Hughes had "no questions at all, no fuss and built this thing perfectly in record time and saved the day," Calder said, chuckling. When Calder got word in the winter that the president gives awards for 4,000-plus hours of community service, he immediately thought of Hughes and asked him to tally up his volunteer hours.

"Typically modest, he came up with a number short of this award," Calder said. It took a friend saying to Hughes, "You've forgotten that you've been teaching carpentry for the past 34 years" to reach - and far surpass - the necessary hours, Calder added.

The whole episode is consistent with the way Hughes approaches community service, he said.

"Volunteering and helping other people is so much a normal part of his life that he doesn't see it as something different."

Good things come in twos

Helping Hughes celebrate his life of volunteering at the event was his wife, Marlene, who knows firsthand how much effort community service demands.

A Gilroy native who met Mike 40 years ago at Mr. Art's Shoes, where he was then a manager - Marlene has been a partner in volunteering, Mike Hughes said. In particular, she was an integral part of making the garlic bread sale a success.

As with Hughes, Marlene's volunteering came from the desire to be useful and contribute to the success of the community. For example, when the couple's two daughters were in Little League and needed a coach, Marlene stepped up to the plate. Once in the position, she coached her kids all the way through the senior leagues of softball.

Marlene Hughes - who works as secretary for the superintendent of the Gilroy Unified School District - deflects praise with the same deftness as her husband, claiming her volunteering is not special.

It doesn't take much," she said. "It's just a way of life, especially when you're born and raised in Gilroy."

Mike Hughes does not cite a hometown pride for his motivation to give to the Gilroy community. He and his wife give because they can be of help.

"We went and saw a need," he said "So we did it."