Perseverance gets toys to the Pine Ridge reservation

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=10522927

Published Thursday December 25, 2008
Perseverance gets toys to the Pine Ridge reservation
BY NANCY GAARDER
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

This is the Christmas that almost wasn't for about 500 children on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation.


A child at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation clutches a sock monkey collected during a toy drive in Omaha.

A truck filled with toys broke down about halfway along its 480-mile journey from Omaha. The driver climbed out and made some calls but found no help. So he smacked this and pushed that and, somehow, the engine started back up.

Still, he couldn't coax the reluctant truck to go over 40 mph.

Maybe it was the bitter cold; maybe it was the blinding, driving snow during the pitch-black final leg. But it was a long, long journey for driver and truck. The seven-hour trip stretched into 13.

What the driver didn't know, and didn't find out until he was snug and warm back in Omaha, was that if he hadn't persevered, there wouldn't have been toys for the boys and girls waiting just across the northwest Nebraska border in South Dakota.

A similar truck from Colorado never left that state because folks there couldn't raise enough money for the toys and trip. And a truck from Kansas broke down and couldn't be revived.


Omaha musician Larry Dunn organized four benefit concerts and then drove donated toys nearly 500 miles to the Pine Ridge reservation.


"If not for him, and Omaha, there would have been no Christmas at all," said David Swallow Jr., who, along with Harvey Ironboy, has organized Christmas activities for children in the reservation's Porcupine district since 1979.

FULL story at link.