Joe McElroy has been busy for years in his hometown.
The 75-year-old is a member of the Haddonfield Lions Club, the former commander of American Legion Post 38, a leader in his men’s faith group, an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Camden and the coach for a basketball team of fourth- and sixth-graders.
Despite that, McElroy said, “I don’t think I deserve the award.”
That honor – the Alfred E. Driscoll Community Service Award – will be presented to McElroy during the Haddonfield Civic Association’s annual dinner on April 15. The award is named for Driscoll, a former New Jersey governor who served between 1947 and 1954.
McElroy “embodies the selfless spirit of the Alfred E. Driscoll Award,” notes the civic association website, “proving that a community is defined not just by where we live, but by how we choose to serve those around us.”
The dinner – first organized in 1937 – will also include the presentation of three scholarships to students in the performing arts: the Bradshaw Literary Award, the Quanci Visual Arts Award and the Kaufmann Performing Arts Award.
McElroy was notified of his award in January.
“I’m very honored,” he acknowledged. “Gov. Driscoll was very accomplished, and I’m just a humble servant. I think a community like Haddonfield, the fabric of this community is volunteerism. So if I can inspire anybody to get involved, I think it is its own reward, building community.
“Community is its own reward.”
McElroy was born in Rockville Centre, New York, and is the ninth of 11 children. He lost three sisters to cancer and a brother to an aneurysm 10 years ago.
His oldest brother was a strong runner in high school who went on to law school. Another brother got a basketball scholarship to Providence College. Yet another was told by McElroy’s mother that while running and basketball were all well and good, he should be involved in something bigger than himself, namely a band.
He ended up playing the tuba, and so did McElroy.
“So when I got into Catholic school, (there was) a little first-grade nun who I think I was taller than,” he recalled. “She grabbed me by the arm and she said, ‘Your brother played the tuba; you’re playing the tuba.’ So … I played from third to 12th grade.”
After high school, McElroy worked at the American Stock Exchange, then was drafted in 1970. He served as an infantryman in the Vietnam War and later became part of an Airborne Ranger Company.
McElroy met his wife, Marge Hutchinson, in 1972 and they were married at the Christ the King Church six years later. They have four children who all graduated from Haddonfield Memorial High School. After working at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, McElroy opened Professional Printing Co. in 1992 at the corner of North Haddon and East Euclid avenues, retiring in 2020.
He served as commander of the Legion post in 2003 and 2004 and again in 2024 and 2025. Beginning in 2020, McElroy helped raised money for the creation of 3,827 metal poppies to honor New Jerseyans who died in World War I. The flowers were made by local artist Lisa Brandinelli-Quanci and modified by McElroy.
The project ended up costing about $10,000. To raise that, McElroy placed newspaper advertisements and sold groups of 10 poppies for $20. Legion post members then planted about 800 of them that cascaded out of the high-school’s second-floor biology room and fell onto its lawn.
McElroy even got planting help from the school football team in 2022.
“Frank, the high-school football coach, he was in my (printing) shop,” McElroy remembered. “I was doing a booklet for the coaches association, and there were boxes full of poppies all over. I said, ‘Look at this; what do you think?.’ He says, ‘My players can help you.’ So the Saturday before Memorial Day … they all came out. They put 1,200 in the ground in an hour.
“Unbelievable.”
That kind of action is the essence of community, McElroy believes, and is illustrated in a book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that involved a World War II trainee.
“Somewhere in the second week, he got this feeling, he’s part of something,” McElroy said, quoting the book. “And it never went away. He knew he was involved in something bigger than himself. It was important.
“And I think that’s what community is about,” McElroy explained. “When you get involved, you get more out of it than you put into it. It’s really kind of simple. It’s a little Biblical.
“But I think it’s the way to live.”
