|
|
Local volunteer giving lots of hugs to America's war effort
By Andy Rieger, Norman Transcript
Evelyn Parker picked through scrap metal on farms in Custer County, looking for anything that might help the war effort. She wasn't alone. Her schoolmates and family helped out. After al, she had six uncles fighting in the war and she wanted to bring them home safely.
Sixty-something years later, she's still helping out. This time, it's her sons and a grandson and thousands of military men and women she'll never meet who keep her volunteer interest. Both sons were in Operation Desert Storm and a grandson just graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point. He'll likely be in Iraq later this year.
"If people don't have a family member or a personal connection over there, they just read about it in the newspaper and go on about their business," she said.
It was a related article in the newspaper that pulled Parker's volunteer string. She read about a group called "Hugs Across America," that made and shipped cooling neckties or "Hugs" to comfort soldiers, sailors and Marines serving in the unbearable heat and cold of Iraq and Afghanistan. The ties are soaked and stay wet and cool for hours or can be put in a microwave to retain warmth.
To date, she's provided more than 2,600 "Hugs," meticulously making them with 88 new, beige Wal-Mart bedsheets, watering crystals from either Lowe's or Wal-Mart and a lot of good old-fashioned American love.
She read about "Hugs" in July and shipped her first box in August. A former office worker in an accounting practice, she keeps meticulous records about her expenses and where the shipments go. She has a four-page instruction sheet that spells out how to make 30 "Hugs" from a bedsheet.
"My sister had given me one of these and I use it when I mow my yard," she said, showing a bright floral print one. Her Marine son reminded her donated material scraps from dress patterns wouldn't work on camouflaged soldiers. Besides the kidding, they'd stand out like a white egret on a red-mud farm pond.
"Now I've made so many of these that I think I could do it in my sleep," she said. With shipping and extras like soap, toothbrushes, clippers, batteries and Butterfingers, it comes out to a little over a dollar per cooling tie. She has financed the biggest share of the project but friends and Sunday school classmates at First Baptist Church also are donors.
She'll keep making the ties as long as the cause warrants it. Sometimes, the production line slows to give her 75-year-old arms and eyes a day off.
"I just rest an afternoon or two. I'm not trying to set any records but I am trying to make their lives a little easier if I can. As long as the military's over there, it's very personal to me. I can't be unconcerned."
|
