It wasn’t the quiet Saturday that Mike Bolts had envisioned.

He settled into a platelet donation chair at the Red Cross donor center in Boise, contemplating the football game he had anticipated watching that afternoon. Then he learned that the game had been canceled at the last minute because of COVID-19.

But at least he could spend a couple hours doing someone some good.

He shifted in his chair and waited to begin his platelet donation.

At home his wife, Liz, picked up the phone. It was the Red Cross looking for Mike. There was an urgent need for a transportation specialist – a Red Cross volunteer who helps deliver blood products – and Mike was on that list.

“You’re looking for Mike?” Liz asked the caller. “He’s right there at the center, donating, as we speak.”

Quickly, the worker found Mike, explaining that an emergency call had come in. Platelets were needed in Enterprise, Ore. Mike had made many deliveries, but Enterprise is a seven-and-a-half-hour round trip from Boise.

The phone lines were busy between the Red Cross Center and the Bolts home that day. Liz agreed to accompany Mike on the drive as soon as his own donation was complete.

No stranger to disaster and crisis situations, Mike spent 20 years of his professional career as a member of the National Catastrophe Team for Allstate Insurance. His team traveled across the country to places struck by national disasters.

When retirement time came around, he wanted to continue helping others. He’d hoped to volunteer as a volunteer transportation specialist, but he had to wait until a position opened. In the interim, he chose to take disaster action team training.

Liz also understands the impact of disaster. In 2007, she watched as fire nearly destroyed the high school where she worked as a library volunteer. In 2008 she responded, becoming a commissioner at the Middleton Idaho Rural Fire Department.

Then, a few months after Mike began volunteering with the Red Cross, Liz joined her husband as a disaster action team volunteer. Now when the phone rings with a disaster call, they respond together.

As wildfires ravaged Oregon this past year, Mike volunteered at a Red Cross shelter near Medford — rather, that was where he thought he was going and what he assumed he would be doing.

“But,” Mike says, “when you assist with the Red Cross, you step in wherever you are needed.”

Instead of Medford, he ended up in a Red Cross warehouse in Portland. No problem — he was willing.

While there, he took the opportunity to certify as a forklift operator, adding one more item to his list of certifications.

Clearly, helping comes naturally to Mike and Liz. As Red Cross volunteers, whether donating platelets, transporting vital blood supplies, helping families impacted by home fires or stocking shelves, they give of their time and energy however and whenever they are needed.