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Good spirits abroad: Community service on Halloween
by Peggy High '55
 As Chapin students discovered this Halloween, providing for those in need doesn’t preclude having fun along the way. Lower and Middle School students each participated in a seasonal service project, collecting costumes for sick children at Montefiore Hospital and money for City Harvest’s Truck or Treat program.
Most of us are familiar with the sight of the green-and-white City Harvest trucks making their rounds of New York’s schools, hotels and restaurants collecting food for the hungry. It takes money to keep those trucks running, especially to supply them with fuel, so Middle School students planned to do their part on Halloween night, trick-or-treating with miniature-truck-shaped cash boxes to collect money to keep City Harvest going.
The students had already learned, when a representative from City Harvest visited them at News, that more than 350,000 of their fellow young New Yorkers “don’t know where their next meal is coming from.” Preparing the students to ask their neighbors for help in feeding people in need, the representative informed them that “even a quarter will enable City Harvest to deliver one pound of fresh, nutritious food to community programs throughout the five boroughs.”
Meanwhile, their Lower School counterparts focused on gathering Halloween costumes, all of them new, for children in Montefiore’s Child Life program, in the Bronx, which aims to minimize the trauma of long hospital stays for children with serious illnesses. They collected the costumes in memory of Emily Nalley, daughter of French teacher Claire Bigelow Nalley ’79. Emily had loved to dress up, especially in pink, while she was undergoing treatments for her illness, and the Chapin students donated outfits with an enthusiasm to match hers, filling two huge containers, one of them a clear plastic container with “Emily’s Dress-Up Box” inscribed in pink lettering across the top.
For the girls at Montefiore, there were fluffy, princess-like creations of tulle and satin, a sequined “Dorothy” dress inspired by The Wizard of Oz and, for the more assertive type, a pirate-girl ensemble. Boys fared equally well. Superman, Batman, an astronaut or two and a Kung Fu fighter’s costume awaited release from their bags to work their magic in the hospital. There was also a police officer’s costume, just in case things got out of hand on Halloween night.
An imaginative effort to comfort sick children and program dedicated to keeping children well through good nutrition both benefited from the good fairies at Chapin this Halloween. We wish those fairies a happy Halloween, and we hope they manage to collect some delicious candy along with their quarters and costumes.
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