FAIRFIELD BAY -- When Linda O'Brien learned she would lose her hair during life-extending treatments for terminal cancer, she began searching for a pretty head covering.
She wanted it to be comfortable but found wigs scratchy, turbans unattractive, and nice kerchiefs "expensive and hard to find," recalled O'Brien's sister, Mary Philips of Fairfield Bay.
So, Philips sewed a cap for her sister, and soon the two women were working together to make more caps.
"She had one for every outfit," Philips recalled. "She would cut them out, and I would sew them."
O'Brien got the cancer diagnosis in 2005. In 2007, she died.
But from those first few kerchiefs, Care Cap Connections, a charitable organization that makes such kerchiefs for women and children with cancer, was formed and has expanded over the years to include hundreds of volunteers, mostly women, in central Arkansas.
O'Brien's legacy was very much alive last week as scores of women -- including her mother, Mary Powell -- and a few men gathered at the Fairfield Bay Conference Center to celebrate the making of the 75,000th Care Cap, a soft gray kerchief with dainty blue, white and pink flowers.
Philips, the organization's founder and director, oversaw the celebration, at which folks not only shared conversation and lunch but also cut, sewed, ironed and packaged a total of 215 more caps, including the celebratory one, in varied colors and patterns, all lined and all made solely of cotton for a patient's sensitive skin. Philips said she, too, was diagnosed with cancer, but hers was detected early and she is cancer-free today.
The organization includes sewing groups that meet in Fairfield Bay, Greenbrier, Little Rock, Hot Springs, Hot Springs Village and Jacksonville, said Philips' husband, Ingram Philips, the group's president and the man in charge of shipping.
"We function strictly off donations," he said.
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The donations allow Care Caps to buy supplies such as bolts of fabric. At the event last week, the fabric rolls were laid out on one table for volunteers to cut at the start of a production line that went from table to table, eventually to an ironing board and finally to a counter where they were packaged along with a small card bearing the creators' names.
The organization also provides sewing machines for volunteers, though some like Diane Jones of Diamondhead near Hot Springs bring their own. Jones, a cancer survivor, sews her stitches on a small black Singer sewing machine that was made in 1946 and formerly belonged to her mother. The organization's machines travel in a trailer donated by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Care Caps sends the caps to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where O'Brien was treated; the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.; St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis; CHI St. Vincent Infirmary in Little Rock; UAMS; and CARTI clinics in Little Rock and Conway.
Mary Philips encourages volunteers to keep a cap in their cars. That way, when they meet someone with cancer, they'll have a cap ready to give the person.
Lana Massanelli of Little Rock has been a Care Caps volunteer for about two years. A retired nurse, she said she has sewn "almost all my life."
Massanelli said another volunteer invited her and she enjoyed the "camaraderie."
Besides, she said, "It feels so good that you're doing something wonderful."
State Desk on 12/05/2016