Want to chat on this Wilmington front porch? You'll have to join the waiting list.

Linda Pearce Thomas isn’t usually one for small talk.

“I am not the type to really sit down and talk to people, not really,” she said. “I've just kind of been: ‘I don't care what your story is, are you going to do this?’”

It’s that directness and straight-shooting sensibility that helped establish Pearce Thomas, 76, as a community leader and advocate in Wilmington when she returned to her family’s Wright Street home in the early 1980s.

Pearce Thomas would go on to found and lead Elderhaus, a nonprofit that today serves hundreds of senior citizens across New Hanover and Brunswick counties by providing meals, daytime care and programming along with healthcare services.

She also served on several community boards, including New Hanover Regional Medical Center and the University of North Carolina Wilmington. There, she made history in 2013 as the first Black woman to chair UNCW’s Board of Trustees.

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Now, although she’s been retired for close to a decade, Pearce Thomas remains active. She’s involved in the Williston Alumni Association and in recent months helped advise Democratic candidate Dorian Cromartie, who she refers to as her “adopted nephew,” on his run for the New Hanover County Board of Education.

“I'll let people drag me into a little bit of stuff, but not much,” she said. “I do now what I want to do.”

Pearce Thomas also carves out time each week just to talk. Most weeks, Pearce Thomas has several conversations scheduled for what she calls her “Front Porch Pulpit.”

During Front Porch Pulpit conversations, Pearce Thomas talks to people from all walks of life, including friends and neighbors, Wilmington’s elected leaders, business executives, community advocates, small business owners and the repairmen doing work around her home.

“Any kind of people, some who are big dogs, some who are not,” she said.

All conversations follow a similar format. She’ll snap a photo of the interview’s subject and then settle in to talk, taking notes. If the weather cooperates, many of the conversations do take place on the front porch of her home. If it’s too cold or there’s too much pollen floating in the air, conversations are moved inside into the home’s living room.

“It’s gotten seasonal,” Pearce Thomas said.

After more than 200 interviews, Pearce Thomas said she’s filled up three or four spiral-bound notebooks. She posts a summary of the conversation on her personal Facebook page and lets social media take over.

Some of her posts have received hundreds of “Likes,” “Shares” and “Comments” on the platform. They’ve also given Wilmington residents – and those who have moved away – a way to connect, catch up and learn about the area’s history, Pearce Thomas said.

Some friends have encouraged her to make a separate Facebook page for her Front Porch Pulpit posts. Others have said she should record the conversations for the library’s archives or turn the exchanges into a large-format coffee table book. But Pearce Thomas said she doesn’t want any part of that.

“I don’t want to make any money,” she said. “I don't want to do nothing but write them.”

At the age of 5, Pearce Thomas first moved to Wilmington from New York to live with the grandmother who would end up raising her. She moved into the same home on Wright Street that she lives in today.

As a child, Pearce Thomas remembers Wilmington’s segregated public bus system where Black riders went to the back of the bus and Blacks weren’t allowed to eat in certain restaurants in downtown Wilmington.

She later went on to attend Williston, Wilmington’s all-Black high school, and has fond memories of her time there and the discipline teachers ground into the students.

“They always told us we had to be 10 times better than white people to be equal,” she said, “and so we had a very strict, very disciplined educational system.”

Pearce Thomas cared for her aging grandmother throughout her high school years, which took a toll on her. After graduating from Williston in 1963, she went to college, in part to get away from her caregiving situation. Pearce Thomas enrolled at North Carolina College, a school that’s now North Carolina Central University at Durham.

After graduating, Pearce Thomas went briefly to New York before landing in Washington, D.C. where she worked at the Library of Congress for 13 years.

Then, in 1980, she returned to Wilmington to care for an aging aunt and with the intention of starting Elderhaus. By then, Pearce Thomas also had a master’s degree in gerontology – the study of old age and the process of aging.

“I knew I was working to get back here to take care of elderly people. I always liked elderly people,” she said.

Her idea was to establish an adult daycare that would give caregivers time to work or rest during the day. At the time, that was a new concept, Pearce Thomas.

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Before Elderhaus, “there was nothing where the person would be taken out of the home,” she said. “That’s why I think it worked. It was so new to everybody.”

Within a year, the program established itself as a nonprofit, formed a board of directors and found a building to provide services out of. Even though Elderhaus was never “homeless,” Pearce Thomas said, it did cycle through several Wilmington locations in its early years. Now, the program is based out of a building near Greenfield Lake Park, across the street from the park’s amphitheater.

During her more than 30 years at the helm of Elderhaus, the job was “all-encompassing,” Pearce Thomas said. She supervised as people developed the organization’s budget, wrote grants, organized fundraisers and dealt with state regulations. She watched the program grow over her years as its chief executive officer, but in 2013, she made the decision to retire.

“It was time to go,” she said. “I was struggling really to keep going physically and mentally.”

But she’s never looked back, just months after her retirement she got married for the first time, “which I never dreamed I would do,” she said. She had a grand wedding and wore a big gown, she remembers smiling, walking into the ceremony to Ella Fitzgerald’s “At Last” and exiting to the Hallelujah chorus.

But about a year and a half into their marriage, her husband got sick. She took care of him until he died.

Since then, she’s lived alone at her home on Wright Street, but she doesn’t mind.

“I've been by myself here, making fun for myself all the years I was growing up,” she said. “I had absolutely no issue during the pandemic. I love being in the house by myself, I really do.”

She started her “Front Porch Pulpit” series about three years ago after receiving a visit from the wife of a former pastor at Pearce Thomas’ church, Mt. Olive AME. The two women talked for over an hour. A few weeks later, Pearce Thomas posted on social media asking people to stop by to chat, and they started coming.

“People started coming by and sitting on a porch,” she said. “Two or three people at the same time.”

But Pearce Thomas believes the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic really fueled the popularity of her “Front Porch Pulpit” posts.

“I think if there hadn't been a pandemic, I don't think it would have gone over as well as it has,” she said. “But it really has surprised me, it has really been a convener of ideas and of people.”

These days, it’s not unusual for Pearce Thomas to have multiple “Front Porch Pulpit” chats each day, sometimes one right after the other, but she plans to continue talking and posting the stories of Wilmington’s leaders and everyday citizens.

“I enjoy doing it. I'm gonna keep doing it as long as I can,” she said.

Reporter Emma Dill can be reached at edill@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Wilmington leader keeps work alive with 'Front Porch Pulpit' chats