By Jan Landon
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

You might find them volunteering or meeting with other submariners or even moving together around a dance floor.

Donald and Nora Pinkston of Overland Park are busy people. But they still found time in 2005 to write a letter to John Erickson, founder of Erickson Retirement Communities, asking that a community be built in Overland Park. A  visit to Donald Pinkston’s sister at Fox Run, an Erickson community in Novi, Mich., inspired the letter.

‘Dear John Erickson …’
“Sure enough, it was everything they said it would be,” Donald Pinkston says about the visit. “It was something we hadn’t seen here in Overland Park. We wrote and asked if there was any chance of them coming to Kansas.”

Two years later, the Pinkstons are on the Priority List for a home in Tallgrass Creek, currently under construction at Metcalf and 139th. Donald Pinkston  attended the ground breaking ceremony for the new community on Oct. 19, 2006.

A campus to match their lifestyle
Did their letter have anything to do with the newest Erickson community being built in Overland Park? They won’t ever know for sure.

What they do know is that their busy lives will continue at Tallgrass Creek.  Nora Pinkston volunteers at Shawnee Mission Medical Center and, when  needed, works as an interpreter for the Shawnee Mission School District.

A native of Peru, she taught Spanish for many years in the public school system.

Donald Pinkston meets every day for coffee with buddies and is very active in a submarine veterans organization. He was an electronics technician on a U.S. Navy submarine in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The longest the submarine was continuously submerged was 35 days.

The Pinkstons also enjoy ballroom dancing together. Donald Pinkston, who worked as a salesman, acknowledges he always has a lot to talk about. He plans on finding many new people to talk with in lots of new conversations at Tallgrass Creek.

“We’re healthy and fit and on the go,” Donald Pinkston says.