We Used to Collect for the Jerry Lewis Telethon

Back in the 70's when people went door to door to collect money for "Jerry's Kids" and you didn't have to worry about them stealing it, we would collect money every year. We went on lots of vacations when I was a kid. We spent nearly every weekend in the Great Smokey Mountains or we were in Florida or we were camping at Summersville Lake. No matter where we were my parents made sure we got home the Sunday before Labor Day so that we could spend Monday collecting for Jerry's Kids.

My friend Sherri and I would go together and Billy and Rhonda would go together. Billy and Rhonda would get the houses closer to our house because they were younger. Sherri and I would roam our whole neighborhood collecting and sometimes roam down to Mitchell Heights too. Some years daddy would drive us to neighborhoods all over Logan to collect.

My parents would give us a glass jar to carry because they said people would give more if they could see money in the jar. Daddy used to make sure that we had "seed money" to start also. He would put a bunch of change and a few ones and an occasional $5 in there so people would give more money. Then we would go out and spend the afternoon collecting for muscular dystrophy. We had to be home by 5 o'clock so that we could count the money and take it to Logan to the local telethon office at the Aracoma Hotel. (I may be wrong but I don't think they had credit card donations in those days - everything was done the old fashioned way by CASH!)

The first few years we would have around $50 and then it went up to the $75 range. Finally we would be so close to $100 that my dad would just add the rest to it so we could make the REALLY BIG DONATION! We were always so proud to march in that Hotel with our jar full of money and all the people would make a big deal out of it. Which it was a big deal. There weren't a whole lot of $100 donations back in those days and we were really happy to help those kids.

Afterwards we would all go to Dairy Queen and get Mister Mistys and hot dogs. It was a great day every year. It is sad that today's kids can't do stuff like that. They are really missing out.