Kids, companies give to relief effort

By Rebecca Cook

Associated Press

OLYMPIA – The woman walked into the Red Cross office here, two small children at her side, and wrote a $50 check.

As local director Kay Walters thanked her, the woman started crying.

“Do you have family there?” Walters asked, wondering if the woman’s relatives had been killed in the terrorist attacks on the East Coast.

“No,” the woman replied, and she gently touched the tops of her children’s heads. “I have these babies.”

Walters paused, recalling the moment: “The whole room got very silent, because that’s what it’s all about. It could be us.”

People across Washington are opening their hearts and their wallets to help victims of the worst terrorist attacks in history – from a Spokane 4-year-old who gave the $7 inside his M&M piggy bank, to Microsoft Corp.’s donation of $10 million.

“It’s just been phenomenal seeing the community come together and try to rise above this,” said Brad Stark, spokesman for the Inland Northwest Red Cross in Spokane. His office alone had collected more than $50,000 by Thursday – including the little boy’s $7.

In Olympia, Walters and her staff were counting envelopes full of pennies along with larger checks. Most came in the mail, some with notes: “Thank you,” “God bless you,” and “What’s happened to our world?”

Glenn Vincent, 47, owner of Shipwreck Beads in Olympia, donated $10,000. His bead-selling business had socked away $6,000 for an employee party: a Puget Sound cruise or maybe a trip on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train.

On Wednesday morning, however, the employees handed him a letter, signed by everyone, asking him to donate the money to the Red Cross. He rounded it out with $4,000 of his own.

“I’d run equipment, I’d jump on a bus right now and go to New York if I could, but I’d just be in the way,” Vincent said. “So I’ll do what I can here and now.”

Big companies across the state mobilized, too. Microsoft Corp. donated $10 million to the “September 11th Fund,” established by the United Way and New York Community Trust – $5 million in cash and $5 million in technical resources and volunteer hours.

Seattle-based Starbucks Coffee Co. is giving free coffee to relief workers. AT&T Wireless, based in Redmond, provided more than 1,300 phones to disaster workers.

Amazon.com, like many Web sites with payment systems, asked users to donate online to the American Red Cross. Since the tragedy, the Seattle Web retailer said people had given more than $1.9 million through its site.

Those who don’t have a lot to give found ways to help, too. Employees of Tully’s coffeehouses in Tacoma decided to donate their tips to the Red Cross. By Thursday they’d raised $750, and were aiming for $1,500 by Saturday.

“There’s people that need a little bit of money a lot more than I do,” said Tacoma Tully’s worker Lorne Ennis. “Everyone on the West Coast is practically powerless to do anything immediately. It’s a way to cope.”

Phones were ringing off the hook at every Washington Red Cross office, even in Okanogan County – the poorest county in the state, with a median household income last year of less than $25,000.

“This county is the Mayberry County. You wave to strangers and they wave back,” said Sandra Byers of the North Cascades Red Cross, where hundreds of callers were asking where to give blood or send checks. She hoped that friendliness wouldn’t be another casualty of the terrorist attacks.

“I don’t think it’ll be changed drastically,” she said. “I don’t know.”

She knew, however, that she could count on her neighbors to keep giving, $5 and $10 at a time, to help people thousands of miles away.

“This community, they are willing to give their last dollar and their last drop of blood.”