Laurel to Helen Brown, who this weekend is again hosting a yard sale to benefit cystic fibrosis research.
This isn’t just any yard sale. Over the past decade or so, Brown has managed to raise $142,000 for the cause. She hasn’t done it alone. Brown readily recognizes the 25 volunteers who help with the sales — this year’s is dedicated to the memory of volunteer Camellia Merrill — and the local residents who donate so much for every event.
And the sale has gotten so big, even the city helps out. During the event, the Salisbury Police Department turns Emerald Street, which runs by Brown’s house, into a one-way thoroughfare to accommodate all the traffic.
It was Brown’s initiative, though, to turn her home into a philanthropic marketplace. She started the sales after learning her two grandchildren, Anna and Michael, had cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening disease of the lungs and digestive system. Both are in their 20s and, Brown said earlier this year, doing well thanks to advances in research and treatment.
But a lot of people need help. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation reports that about 30,000 children and adults have the disease, and 1,000 more are diagnosed each year. That’s why Brown keeps putting on her yard sale, and why the community should keep supporting it.
The sale continues today, 8 a.m.-4 p.m., at 1621 Emerald St.
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Laurels to Quinn Scarvey and Simone Anderson, recent graduates of Lenoir-Rhyne University, for remembering the lesson we’re all taught as children — there are hungry people out there, and we shouldn’t let food go to waste — and doing something about it.
In the case of Anderson and Scarvey — a Salisbury High School graduate and daughter of Dave and Katie Scarvey — the food wasn’t sitting on a plate but in a computer. As commuters at the Hickory school, they’d paid for a semester of meals up front and realized shortly before graduating they hadn’t eaten well over 200 of them.
With enthusiastic support from Aramark, the college’s food service provider, and help from the head of the local soup kitchen, the young women bought dinner for more than 100 poverty stricken and homeless men, women and children at the campus dining hall. Not only that, they took time to talk with as many of them as they could.
Scarvey and Anderson, who is from Boone, have been featured in newspaper and television reports — including a May 17 story in the Salisbury Post — for their selfless act. But Scarvey says the best thing to happen was that Aramark said students could donate their leftover meals again next year.
Seems everybody learned a good lesson.