Rough start in life evolves into ‘tremendous community effort’
Homewood teen and his mother collect more than 600 pounds of pop tabs for Oak Lawn McDonald House
Dylan Parry and his mother, Brooke King-LaBreck, of Homewood are close to becoming members of an exclusive club, thanks to their donations of pop top tabs to the Ronald McDonald House in Oak Lawn.
The Thanks-a-Million Club is made up of those who donate 1 million tabs to the organization. That translates into 789 pounds of aluminum, and Parry and his mom are almost there.
Since they began collecting in 2014, they’ve donated 614 pounds — nearly 78,000 tabs, including their most recent donation on Jan. 17. Thus far, the Ronald McDonald House in Oak Lawn has just 38 families in that club, according to Ruth Anne Renaud, vice president of marketing and communications for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland and northwest Indiana.
“It’s always so good to hear when a family has been making that effort and doing that,” Renaud said.
In typical years, Parry and King-LaBreck bring their tabs to the Ronald McDonald House at 4410 W. 93rd St., staff weigh them, and the mother and son spend the day volunteering at the facility. But in the midst of the highly contagious omicron variant of COVID-19, they brought the jars, bags and boxes to the door and loaded up a cart that
staff brought inside to weigh.
“They are always so surprised to see how much two people bring in and always beyond gracious,” King-LaBreck said. “We always spent time with the volunteers on staff telling them Dylan’s story and how our trying to give back has evolved into a tremendous community effort. They dote on Dylan and make a big fuss of him and how far he’s come from how his life began.”
Parry, now a senior at Homewood-Flossmoor High School, enjoys the project.
“Every year I set higher goals. It feels really good to drop it off and see the faces of the staff when we walk in with this huge
amount of tabs,” he said.
He continues to collect tabs to help pay it forward for other families who need Ronald McDonald House and the sanctuary it provides. The charitable organization operates five houses near children’s hospitals in the Chicago area, as well as three family rooms inside hospitals, mobile care and other projects.
Families with children in the hospital can stay at a Ronald McDonald House nearby regardless of ability to pay, with amenities such as meals provided.
“I know how much it meant to my parents and I can’t imagine how hard it is for families to have their kids hospitalized long-term without thinking of all of the things Ronald McDonald House takes care of,” the 17-year-old said. “They provide a great service helping families stay together during really tough times.”
Parry was born with congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation of the lung, so he underwent surgery at 1 month old to remove his cystic lung and reposition his heart. His parents stayed at the Ronald McDonald House near Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, which has since been torn down, along with the hospital. Now they support the Oak Lawn facility.
“Homewood was just too far from Chicago to risk going home in case something happened,’ KingLaBreck said. “I don’t know what I’d have done during those days without the Ronald McDonald House, their staff, volunteers, and the bonds I made with other families in similar situations. To put it simply, they took as many of life’s worries off of my plate as possible, so I could fully invest in being present for my baby during the worst time of my life.”
When she left the house in Lincoln Park after her longterm stay in 2004, “I was overwhelmed at checkout to be told to just pay what I could,” the mom said. “His father and I were unable to work during this time and medical bills were relentless, so we weren’t able to pay much at all. I vowed then to return as a volunteer and do all I could to raise money and awareness for the charity,” she said.
“It started with something as simple as a vase in the kitchen to collect our pop tabs. Each year around Dylan’s birthday, I’d return to the house with toiletry donations and to make dinner for the families in residence. Once Dylan became old enough to understand, I got him involved with collecting pop tabs. As a little kid, he’d pester anyone with a pop can to save their tabs for him, and honestly that’s how our collection started to grow beyond our household.
“The first year I started documenting was 2014, as his classroom and my friends brought in a pretty impressive haul, filling two boxes. We were blown away! Now it’s nearly 10 times that.”
Last year the two donated 160 pounds in tabs, thanks to their network of donors who collected tabs from cans of seltzer, beer, soup, fruit, vegetables, baby formula, cat food, canned meat and pop. (Any aluminum pull tab is acceptable.)
In addition to tabs, gift cards to CVS, Walgreens, Target and Starbucks are accepted to give families staying at the house. “These gift cards are often a lifeline to purchase medical supplies, prescriptions, clothing and necessities while financial means are strained,” King-LaBreck said.
With help from friends and family, she started a network of collection points for the tabs. She also accepts donations all year at her office at Flossmoor Community
Church.
“Many in the community have come to know me as the pop tab lady,” she said.
“Dylan and I spend a few weekends prior to MLK day driving around the community doing residential pickups for those who need us to, and often all throughout January we come home to several bags on our front porch and notes with gift cards in the mail,” she said. “We’ve even had pop tab collections shipped to us from as far as California.”
“Every January we get really busy picking them up from people’s houses and moving them all to larger containers,” the teen said. “This year I started driving so I was able to take some of that off my mom’s plate.”
The preschoolers at Flossmoor Community Church Weekday Preschool turn some in every year, and this past year, the teaching staff at Winston Churchill Elementary School in Homewood turned in a huge garbage bag full of tabs. One of her biggest supporters for the last four or five years has been Patti Jo Boehm’s second grade class at Willow School in Homewood, which Dylan attended.
“The children ask the most remarkable questions, and hearing about Dylan’s story really personalizes the experience for them,” KingLaBreck said.
Boehm said she decided to involve her students in the project “to build some authenticity” into her curriculum. “It’s not something in the curriculum or textbook or teaching manual. It’s real life and they can experience that. We talk a lot about helping other people and how we treat them.”
She said the donation effort starts the day after Parry and his mom pick up the tabs already collected. “Other people in the district know we collect too. I get interoffice mail from people that are full with pop tabs. I’ve had kids bring in big Ziploc bags full,” she said.
“We talk about how those little bitty things can make a difference,” Boehm said, adding that this year they collected a copy paper box full of tabs. “There’s so much more that they should be learning. … I hope this sets them up for the future and becomes part of the way they become productive members of society.”
Renaud agreed having community involvement in the charity is important “and it’s a beautiful way to teach empathy and learn how to take care of one another.”
Donated pop tabs are taken to United Scrap Metal in Cicero.
“They get weighed and depending on what the market price is, we get the financial value of that,” Renaud said. “That money goes into all the things we do to make certain we provide the shelter and comfort of families for a place to stay.”
She said the charity has been in the Chicago area for 45 years, and the Oak Lawn house has existed since 2008. “Whether a family needs to stay for just a few nights or has a child with a chronic illness or is going to need longer therapeutic care, it’s such a comfort to know there’s a place to call home for that period of time.”