Family tradition warms those in need
Just like dad, Ross Vickers supplies sleepers, track suits
Ross Vickers has helped put stockings in countless thousands of GTA homes for 18 Christmases running.
Sleepers and track suits and mittens, as well.
And Vickers, who is the key procurer of clothing for the Star’s Santa Claus Fund gift boxes, is following in the footsteps of his father, Len, who did the same thing for two decades before him.
“We’ve had this contact with the Star for a long, long time,” says the younger Vickers, 76, who volunteers his professional time to the fund, which pays for the clothing.
“My father and myself, we both thought this was always a terrific cause,” he says.
Vickers company — Len Vickers Sales Ltd — arranges the deals that literally put warmth in the gift boxes, which will be distributed to some 45,000 GTA children this year.
Vickers works mainly with the Toronto firm Rose Textiles, which imports the gift-box clothing and sells it, through him, at a discount to the fund, he says.
“They’re not interested in making a big profit out of it; it’s making it as low as possible price-wise,” says Vickers, who was delivering some last-minute socks to the fund’s secret Rexdale warehouse last week.
Those late-arriving articles were added to the staggering load of clothing that’s quickly being packed, labelled and stacked at the cavernous facility, where volunteer “elves” toil amid Christmas music and decorations.
“In each age group, in socks for instance, we do from age 1 right to age 12,” Vickers says.
“And there’s anywhere from probably 250 to 300 dozen (pairs) in each age group.”
Helping arrange such vast clothing deliveries has been a generational calling for Vickers, who took over his father’s business and Santa Fund work before Len passed away in1998.
“I think it’s a very worthwhile cause, to begin with . . . and I am happy to do it for that reason,” Vickers says.
“But I sort of feel a bit of loyalty because of the past connection with my father, who started it so long ago.”
The churchgoing elder Vickers — an avid Star reader — felt a special compassion for the city’s underprivileged children, whose Christmases he helped enliven with the fund’s presents, his son says.
“When he was slowing down, before he passed away, he said, ‘OK, you look after it’ and I was quite happy to get involved,” Vickers says.
Vickers himself has four children, who he hopes will volunteer their time with the fund in some way when his turn is done.
“If you can help give children some warmth and happiness at Christmas, it’s absolutely worth doing,” he says.
The fund was begun by legendary Star publisher Joseph E. Atkinson in 1906.
But it found its roots years earlier, when a stranger bought Atkinson — whose mother had been recently widowed — a pair of skates for Christmas.