Barbara Stailey is one of about 20 volunteers who maintain the Graham County Historical Society Museum in Thatcher.

“I’m the bag lady,” she said recently, referring to carrying out the trash.

Toni Williams, the museum’s volunteer assistant director, described her another way.

Barbara Stailey, a volunteer at the Graham County Historical Society Museum in Thatcher, demonstrates the workings of an old telephone switchboard in the museum’s technology room. Read more inside about people who volunteer to make the Gila Valley a better place in this Giving Issue. Photo by Diane Saunders

“She’s the one who’s always here on Saturday afternoons,” Williams said.

Museum Director Mel Jones added, “She also takes care of the outside of the building.”

Stailey has volunteered at the museum about two years and says she enjoys telling guests about the pioneer days of the Gila Valley. She also likes meeting people who come to the museum.

“We’ve had people here from Scotland and England and a lot of different places,” Stailey said.

While she is knowledgeable about all the museum’s displays, Stailey has firsthand experience with one of the items in the technology room. This display includes part of the telephone switchboard used for phone service in Safford. Stailey was a telephone operator — the person responsible for connecting one phone customer to the other.

“When there was a fire, the whole board would light up,” Stailey recalled. “Everyone wanted to know where the fire was.”

Though she likes leading tours in the museum and talking about the Valley’s history, her favorite job is “making sure it (museum) looks good on the outside.”

Jones talked about the work done by volunteer Gary Papazian, who died in early 2008.

“He came to the museum one day, and we just started talking,” Jones recalled.

The two men talked about projects that needed to be done at the museum. Papazian completely restored a player piano, which had 88 keys. Each of those keys had 21 moving parts, Jones said.

Williams said Papazian also cleaned and repaired several music boxes in the museum.

“He was not a professional; he was a tinkerer,” Jones said.

The last project Papazian worked on was the technology room, where the telephone switchboard and other items from long ago are displayed.

Williams said volunteers like Stailey and Papazian are crucial to museum.

“Our whole operation runs on volunteers,” she said.