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| Delivering
toys and joy |
The Newberg Fire Department's Toy-and-Joy programs serves
more than 350 families this year, an increase of 40 over last year |
By Gary Allen, Newberg Graphic news
editor
E-mail Gary at gallen@eaglenewspapers.com
|
 Three hundred fifty families, including more than
800 children, enjoyed a Christmas filled with presents Thursday thanks to a band of
intrepid volunteers, and their families, at the Newberg Fire Department.
A trip to the department’s main fire station on Christmas Eve and you
would have witnessed a flurry of activity as volunteers loaded hundreds of presents into
waiting vehicles as part of the department’s Toy-and-Joy program.
For two weeks prior to the big day, volunteers huddled in a back room of the
station wrapping presents — so many presents, in fact, that they nearly ran out of
wrapping paper, according to Al Blodgett, division chief. The presents — donated or
bought with money raised during the department’s Pancake Breakfast and Turkey
Carnival, among others — filled one room and pushed an engine and a brush rig from
their bay.
Presents were also purchased this year with $3,500 donated by a local estate.
Blodgett speculated on why people give to the program.
“Because at some time in that person’s life they (benefited) from
Toy-and-Joy,” he said. “So it was time to pay back.”
The department’s four managers of the event — Blodgett, Cheryl Corum, Ben
Erb and Jill Dorrell — carefully gathered from a number of sources the names of the
families that would receive presents. Those names were kept in a log that, come Christmas
eve, was used to produce boxes of presents ready for shipping. The boxes filled a room and
were passed through a doorway and arranged in the main bay to await transport to the
families.
More than 25 drivers of vehicles ranging from vans (some donated for the day
by three local auto dealers) and pickups with canopies, lined up outside the station,
awaiting the presents. Each driver would be responsible for delivering eight to 10
families’ presents; there were 34 routes in all.
Blodgett explained the effort has become a rewarding, although sometimes
daunting, task in the 60-plus years since its inception.
“Last year we thought we had a big year with 309 families,” he said
as he watched the effort unfold before him.
Blodgett said that although a sour economy can be blamed for some of the
increase in families needing presents, the fact that the town’s population is
burgeoning may also be a major factor. Those increases have been counteracted to some
degree in the last few years when the Dundee Fire Department began its own Toy-and-Joy
program and the NFD no longer had to deliver to families in its neighbor to the west.
The volunteers assembled Wednesday didn’t all have some connection to
the department, though. Jeff Coffman, a Dundee resident, showed up with his 8- and
15-year-old daughters “because I want them to learn (the true meaning of)
Christmas,” he said. |
|
From Dec. 27,
2003, Newberg Graphic
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