To the Editor:

Our utmost thanks to the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) as they have hosted the St. Mary’s Thanksgiving Basket Program for four years. We’re so grateful that we have such a roomy and friendly space to operate out of. Rich Tenace, our liason with the church, was very graciously available to open the church for us when we needed to get in. John Chapman grew and donated the potatoes that we included in everyone’s food box. Thank you to Rich and John and the other LDS members who helped us during food transporting, sorting, potato bagging, box packing, setting up and taking down tables and cleaning up.

Thank you to the local merchants who made donations, who worked with us on prices of perishables that we needed to buy, including turkeys and milk, who saved boxes for us and who allowed the AAK Interact Club and Kiwanis children to hold food drives.

Students from Potsdam schools, of all ages, were involved with providing food for the Thanksgiving boxes. As mentioned above, the K-Kids (Kiwanis, elementary-age) held food drives. They and their advisor, Carla Ingram, spent many hours over multiple days collecting food and money at both IGA and Save-a-Lot. Students from the AAK Middle School Interact Club, along with their advisor, Emily Brouwer, collected food at Save-a-Lot on busy weekend day. The Student Council (Jim Allott, advisor) from the high school provided all the margarine and bread that we needed. They’ve been generously donating an ample amount of perishable food for the baskets for many years.

Finally, the Key Club (Phil Foisy, advisor) held a food drive in the high school. We even had an AAK student, needing community service hours, who helped with the transporting of food from St. Mary’s Church, and the sorting and packing that was done at LDS. As you can see, Potsdam students are very charitable. Thank you to all the students who participated in one-way or another.

Thanks also, to the many organizations for their monetary donations. Boy Scout Troop 77, with leaders Bill and Joanne Swift, again bagged potatoes for us and added them to the boxes. We thank them for being available to us every year to do this chore.

St. Mary’s Church, our sponsor, is always behind us all the way. Thank you to Msgr. Aucoin for his support; Patty McGinnis, secretary, for a myriad of tasks, especially handling family registration calls; Mike Norman, maintenance, for assisting us with the physical aspects of the program, including picking up the turkeys and helping with distribution; and Peter Mueller, Pastoral Associate, who helped with many things, including organizations, personnel and delivering.

We wish to thank several people who brought turkeys to the rectory, sometimes along with the “fixins.” Also, thank you to everyone who sent in monetary donations to be used for turkeys.

It takes a lot of help to organize and bring to fruition the St. Mary’s Thanksgiving Basket Program. A huge thank you to the committee that helped us get there, namely Peter Mueller, Maeve Lanning, Tony Woods, Rose Preston and Carol Fries. We appreciate the many people who helped us move the collected food from St. Mary’s Church to LDS, sort food and pack the boxes. We had a large crew on distribution day, which made everything run quite smoothly. Besides the Lions who delivered, thank you to Marie Bullard, Sandy LaShomb, Bob Stark, Jim Chase, Bill Manning, Reeves Adair, John Castle, and Jack Maroney.

Last, but not least, we would like to thank Craig Freilich at North Country This Week for writing a nice piece about the Thanksgiving program. It must have sparked the interest of its readers because there was an increase in donations following its release on NorthCountryNow.com and in the newspaper. Thank you, Craig.

Betty Rowe and Pat Reichhart, Co-coordinators of the St. Mary’s Thanksgiving Basket Program