Sockin’ it to ’em

Seniors ‘monkey around’ to care for kids at holiday time with cuddly gifts displaying impish grins

By Nancy Townsley

The Forest Grove News-Times, Nov 27, 2009, Updated Nov 27, 2009

Chase Allgood / News-Times

Delores Gulley holds up a completed sock monkey, one of 96 faux primates being stuffed and sewn together by volunteers at the Forest Grove Senior and Community Center. The toys will be given away to area children by police and medical personnel.

Piles of white polyester stuffing, brown yarn and red thread cover fold-up tables in the main activity room at the center on Douglas Street. Scissors and sewing needles fly in the hands of two dozen craft-oriented elders drawn to the quirky project.

Steve Seeley, the center’s chef and organizer of the effort, knows exactly why.

“Every year we think about what we can do to get local seniors involved and give them something meaningful to do around the holidays,” said Seeley, who’s worked at the senior center for 12 years. “From the moment I mentioned this project, everybody was excited about it.”

After securing a thumbs-up from center director Courtney Jaren and a soft buy-in from a few of the regular seniors, Seeley set to work on research.

“I just said to myself, ‘Everybody loves sock monkeys,’ and got online,” noted Seeley, whose enthusiasm quickly spread to others, including Judy Hesselgesser, director of the Forest Grove Loaves & Fishes Center.

“Judy has been a great help getting this off the ground,” said Seeley, who found a pattern on the Internet and procured a donation of two cases of size 10-13 socks from a mill in Osage, Iowa.

Seeley e-mailed the company’s officers, explaining he intended to tap the talents of local seniors to create sock monkeys and give them away to children for the holidays.

Something worthwhile

For Hesselgesser, who regularly interacts with many of the folks who frequent the senior center, it was a perfect opportunity to hook up people with time on their hands with a worthwhile philanthropic adventure.

“It gets the seniors together doing something worthwhile,” said Hesselgesser.

That’s the reason 79-year-old Theresa Nikirk of Hillsboro, a kitchen volunteer at the senior center, has jumped on the sock monkey band wagon.

“We’re the stuffers – that’s our job today,” Nikirk said Monday as she worked to get the right amount of fluff into a monkey’s right leg.

“They asked me if I wouldn’t mind stuffing some of the toys, and I said ‘OK,’” Nikirk said.

A few problems

Billie Johnson of Forest Grove, who works in the center’s gift shop, attended the first monkey-making shift Nov. 16, when the process was brand new to the volunteers.

“We ran into a few problems – the cotton batting wasn’t working at all,” noted Johnson. Someone went on an errand for polyester stuffing, and – voila! – the glitch was solved.

Nikirk has put herself on sock monkey duty outside the scheduled production time.

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