Campaign collects $16,000 in cans, bottles for Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park
May 23, 2005
Contact: Link McKie
(617) 373-8324
(617) 373-8773 (fax)
l.mckie@neu.edu
WORCESTER, Mass. – One homeless man donated four cans – 20 cents worth -- from his own collections, dropping them off at Worcester’s South Division Fire Station. He left the station with $20 firefighters gave him in gratitude for his gift.
A Grafton, Mass., man who saved cans and bottles for a year to help pay for a vacation for him and his wife instead donated them at the Grafton Street Fire Station.
Seventeen Massachusetts fire departments, from Scituate on the state’s east coast to Heath approaching its border with New York, contributed 40,000 cans and bottles to the collection campaign.
Many of the 25,000 students and 4,000 employees in Worcester’s 47 public schools took part in the campaign. Three public schools had collection drives at the school themselves. The rest of the students joined their parents in the hundreds of individual drop-offs made at Worcester’s 11 fire stations.
Restaurants, bars and package stores also donated, many of them in answer to a challenge issued before the campaign began by Jim Donoghue, owner of Tweed’s Pub Restaurant in Worcester, to match his donation of a week’s worth of redeemable containers.
About 30 off-duty Worcester firefighters picked up donated cans and bottles at designated collection sites, and delivered them to the central redemption center. They spent 23 days collecting and counting the returnables, in what was supposed to have been a six-day campaign. They picked up, dropped off and counted 318,527 cans and bottles, with a nickel-a-container value totaling $15,926.35. And that doesn’t count a donation from Foxwoods Resort Casino and final returns from the Big Y supermarket chain.
The drive became so successful that it not only went 17 days past its planned end date, but also:
- Forced the firefighter organizers to locate a 40-foot trailer to store their donated cans and bottles so that the redemption center had room for its other, regular returns.
- Filled 200 trash bags just with the hundreds of other trash bags used for drop-offs made by Worcester-area residents.
- Filled a Dumpster with paper waste from the boxes of cans and bottles donated by residents, restaurants and others.
“The Worcester 6 Fire Fighters Challenge: Yes We ‘Can’ Bottle & Can Drive” was from its beginning on April 25 a numbers game: A quest to collect 1 million cans and bottles, to raise money for Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park.
Seventeen days after the “official” deadline for the drive ended April 30, Worcester Fire Lt. Donald Courtney said: “If we had ever collected 1 million cans and bottles, we’d have ground the redemption center to a halt.
“It was a truly a community effort, in every sense and in the best sense of the words,” said Courtney, who came up with the idea for the campaign and who spearheaded its organization.
The Five Cents Worth Redemption Center, 192 Harding St., Worcester, served as the final destination for the collection drive in Worcester. “It was the biggest drive they’ve ever seen,” Courtney said.
All proceeds from the campaign will honor the six firefighters who died in a fire Dec. 3, 1999, at Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Co.
“We are grateful to the thousands of residents, businesses and other organizations who took the time to remember our fallen heroes in this campaign,” Michael J. Donoghue, chairman of the Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Committee, said. “We are also grateful to Don Courtney and his many brothers who remembered their own so fittingly with their labor of love in this very successful fund-raiser. “Our community came together six years ago when we lost our fallen heroes,” Donoghue said. “Through this campaign, our community came together again as we prepare to honor our fallen heroes’ memories with Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park.”
The response to the can-and-bottle drive proved to be so overwhelming that at midweek during the campaign firefighters had to put in place a trailer donated by R&M Leasing Corp. of Oxford at Five Cents Worth Redemption Center, just to provide extra storage space so the redemption center could continue to serve its regular customers.
The firefighters who organized and carried out the campaign also had to rely on donated trash bags and a donated Dumpster to take care of the plastic and paper trash left from the collection drive. Trash companies also donated their time and equipment to haul the paper and plastic trash away.
Besides the fire departments, public schools, and restaurants, bars and package stores that contributed so heavily to the drive, the “Yes We ‘Can’” campaign benefited from donations made by Our Lady of Czestochowa parish; employees at Worcester City Hall; Worcester State College; residents at Colony Retirement Homes; and such Worcester organizations as the East Side Improvement Club, the Marine Corps League, the Main South American Legion Post, and Local 2325 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
The next step is to submit to the Guinness World Records the necessary documentation to determine whether the campaign qualifies for establishing a world record for collecting the most cans and bottles in one week, Courtney said. Guinness World Records will evaluate the validity and significance of the final tally before determining that an official world record has been set.
Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park, to be located near Worcester Fire Department headquarters off Grove Street near Institute Park on Salisbury Pond, is hosting its Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Campaign Kickoff June 6 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, to begin formally its fund-raising campaign.
Donations to the memorial can be made to Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial on the Web site http://www.fallen-heroes.org or by mail to Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial, 34 Glennie Street, Worcester, Mass. 01605.
Firefighters Paul A. Brotherton, Timothy P. Jackson, Jeremiah M. Lucey, James F. “Jay” Lyons III, Joseph T. McGuirk, and Lt. Thomas E. Spencer died during rescue operations in the Worcester Cold Storage building, off Route 290 near downtown Worcester.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Don Courtney is available at (508) 326-7454. Mike Donoghue is available at (508) 798-7722.
Courtesy photos from the donation campaign are available by contacting Link McKie at (617) 373-8324 or l.mckie@neu.edu.
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Last modified: May 24, 2005, 15:56 EDT