Worcester school students donate to Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial
April 28, 2005
Contact: Link McKie
(617) 373-8324
(617) 373-8773 (fax)
l.mckie@neu.edu
WORCESTER, Mass. – Worcester firefighters will pick up cans and bottles at 11 a.m. Friday, April 29, collected by students at Grafton Street School, 311 Grafton St., as part of “The Worcester 6 Fire Fighters Challenge: Yes We ‘Can’ Bottle & Can Drive.”
Students at the elementary school collected the cans and bottles for the campaign, and asked firefighters to pick them up, as the weeklong drive is coming to a close.
The students are among the 21,000 Worcester public schoolchildren who were encouraged by the Worcester School Department to contribute to the fund-raising campaign to help pay for creation of Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park. 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.
Schools officials said virtually all of Worcester’s 46 public schools are taking part in the collection campaign. Many students and their parents are collecting returnables and bringing them to the campaign’s dropoff points: the 11 Worcester fire stations and The Five Cents Worth Redemption Center, 192 Harding St., Worcester. At least six Worcester public schools are serving as dropoff locations for their students’ donated cans and bottles, and one school is making a cash donation to the memorial park.
Since the collection campaign began Monday, April 25, bars, restaurants and package stores have accepted a challenge issued by Jim Donoghue, owner of Tweed’s Pub Restaurants in Worcester and on Route 9 at the Northboro-Westboro line, to match his donation of a week’s worth of redeemable containers to the campaign.
The Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Committee sent letters to more than 500 licensed establishments to meet the challenge issued by Donoghue, former president of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association.
Tweed’s in Worcester is located at 231 Grove St., near Worcester Fire Department headquarters and the site of Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park, bordering Salisbury Pond and Institute Park.
By the midpoint of the campaign Wednesday, April 27, firefighters already had been “very, very active” with can-and-bottle pickups from donors, Worcester Fire Lt. Donald Courtney, who came up with the idea for the collection campaign, said. He said firefighters also already had “a lot of pickups” booked for the final official day of the campaign, Saturday, April 30.
Courtney noted that the response has been so overwhelming that at midweek firefighters had to place a trailer donated by R&M Leasing Corp. of Oxford at Five Cents Worth Redemption Center just for storage of cans and bottles donated to their campaign, so the redemption center could continue to serve its regular customers.
Worcester firefighters will continue to make pickups of cans and bottles even after Saturday, April 30, as long as they are notified about the pickup by that date, Courtney said.
Besides the Worcester public schools and licensed liquor establishments, other fire departments in Massachusetts, the Worcester Boys & Girls Club, Friendly House, and Holy Name and St. Peter-Marian high schools are among those joining Worcester firefighters in the collection campaign.
The bottle-and-can campaign’s goal was to collect 1 million cans and bottles to raise at least $50,000 toward construction of Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park and to establish a benchmark in the Guinness World Records for collecting the most cans and bottles in one week.
Andrew Dube and Richard Simard, owners of Five Cents Worth Redemption Center, will tally the redeemable containers collected and report the results to Guinness World Records. Guinness World Records will evaluate the validity and significance of the final tally before determining that an official world record has been set.
More information about the campaign can be obtained at the Web site for Worcester Fire Fighters Memorial Park, http://www.fallen-heroes.org.
Those interested in donating refundable containers can contact Courtney at (508) 831-0519 to arrange for firefighters to pick them up. Returnable cans and bottles also can be dropped off at Five Cents Worth Redemption Center, 192 Harding St., or at any of Worcester’s 11 fire stations: 141 Grove St., 180 Southbridge St., 424 Park Ave., 41 Webster St., 267 Plantation St., 745 Grafton St., 19 Burncoat St., 1067 Pleasant St., 438 West Boylston St., 100 Providence St., and 80 McKeown Road.
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. Their deaths marked the worst loss of firefighters’ lives in more than 20 years in a building fire in America, and the third worst fire in Massachusetts’ history.
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.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Press coverage is invited of the firefighters’ pickup of cans and bottles from students at the Grafton Street School, at 11 a.m. Friday, April 29, at the school, 311 Grafton Street, Worcester. Telephone: (508) 799-3478.
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Last modified: May 11, 2005, 10:00 EDT