Queen of the Y no more; queen of hearts forever.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

Rich Palmieri was living in a Volkswagen Jetta.

Sue Niles was pregnant and fearful about becoming a mother.

Scott Reames was a University of Oregon math major, a word guy stuck on a numbers track.

Along with 75 others, they toasted retiring Carolyn Mead last week at River Ranch Steakhouse for her 30 years with the YMCA, remembering who they'd been when they'd met her. And who she'd helped them become.

At 36 with two elementary school-age kids, Mead had started at the "Y" in 1978 as the towel-room attendant. She finished as head of guest services, the front-desk coordinator. But most people knew her as the club's self-professed owner.

The "C" in YMCA, some joked, stood for Carolyn. She was known as the "Queen of the `Y,'?" a woman who, her singing of Dixie Chicks songs aside, made people around her feel better - be they attorneys, spike-haired teens or the UPS guy who attended the farewell.

If she could be, as Reames says, "brassy" at times - think Lucille Ball - there was a reason why her departure triggered four days of special events, from seniors putting on a potluck to preschoolers getting her a throne decorated with her favorite birds: pink flamingoes.

"Don't get wet," she'd joke to the kids who were heading for the pool. They called her "Grandma."

There was a reason she got phone calls and letters and e-mails from New York and Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., and a scrapbook with 80 my-favorite-memory cards from "Y" members and employees.

"Because," says Niles, the club's literal director of fun, "she treated everyone as if you were walking into her home and you were the most important guest."

She was the fixed point in an often-chaotic lobby. Now 66, she spent nearly half her life at 2055 Patterson St., outlasting four executive directors. She's hired people whose mothers she had hired.

"She was the one constant," Executive Director Dave Perez said.

Mead worked about 7,500 days, signed up thousands of new members, hired hundreds of college students and held scores of babies - almost always, folks say, with a smile on her face. This was family.

Then, suddenly, she was standing at her retirement gig, wondering what we'll all wonder in the end: Did I make a difference?

The answer was everywhere: In Reames, the UO student whom Mead not only hired but encouraged to take over the nonprofit's deadly dull newsletter.

"She believed in me," he says. "At a time when a lot of other people had been tracking me into math and sciences, she said: `You like to write. You're funny. You can do this.'?"

He did it. Then became public relations director. After a PR stint at Nike, he is now the Beaverton company's historian. "A dream job," Reamessays. In part, he says, because of her.

The answer was in Niles, the mother-to-be whose daughter, Taylor, is now 15. "She helped me raise my kids. Big crisis or small, she stood there with open arms and strong shoulders. She believed in you completely until you believed in yourself."

And the answer was in Palmieri, whose mother had died when he was 7. He bounced around for years, homeless, looking for a place to belong. In the early '90s, he found it when Mead gave him a front-desk job. "I not only got a job, I got a mother from the deal."

Oh, the two had their moments, but how could you stay angry at a woman who'd helped save your life? "She taught me to clean up my life, how to be a functioning member of society," says Palmieri, now 43. "She believed in me."

He's now the supervisor of the building, a building, that will be quieter and less zany without Mead around. But whose soul is forever enriched because the Queen of the "Y" once reigned.

See Bob Welch's blog at [e-mail]/blogs.