BY ALEX CANTATORE
For the past year, a group of dedicated bakers at the Turlock Silvercrest Seniors Residence on Lander Avenue have been cooking up a little homemade support for America’s troops overseas.
It all started when Silvercrest resident Edna Gilson made the seemingly innocent decision to send a care package of cookies to her son, who was serving in the U.S. Air Force overseas. Following a rave review - and a request for more cookies - boxes and boxes of freshly baked treats have been making their way across the Atlantic to a total of five servicepeople, all related to Silvercrest residents.
About 13 dozen cookies are baked at a time, in varying flavors like oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip, and peanut butter. Packages go out to servicemen and women representing three branches of the armed forces in Kuwait, Iraq, and “somewhere in the desert.”
“That’s all we’re allowed to know,” Gilson said.
All of the bakers chip in for the required ingredients and postage to produce and ship the cookie care packages, an act of giving that’s worth noting, according to Major Debbie Hood, Resident Administrator of Silvercrest.
“They all operate on a very limited income,” said Hood.
In their year of baking, the low-income senior residents of Silvercrest never had an opportunity to meet the recipients of their hours of baking. That all changed on Thursday, when Marine Lance Cpl. Jimmy Devito returned home from Iraq and paid a visit to Silvercrest and his grandmother, Barbara Nilsen, who helped bake cookies.
Devito will have served in the Marines for two years in October. Having just completed his first deployment in Iraq, Devito is glad to be home, and especially glad for the cookies.
“Their cookies are what kept us awake on missions,” Devito said. “… Their baking, their support, is what helped all of us stay alive.”
According to Devito, the chow isn’t too bad at the mess hall in Iraq, but daily 10 to 17 hour missions keep the Marines away from food for long periods of time. Sometimes, he said, missions would run on for days, leaving the Marines nothing but the Silvercrest residents’ cookies to eat.
As Devito and the bakers shared a cake and coffee, snapped pictures, and chatted, Gilson was happy to see the fruits of the bakers’ labor.
“It’s just a good feeling,” Gilson said. “It is such an honor to be able to see and greet and honor him for his service.”
Devito plans to spend his time back home catching up with family and celebrating his one-year anniversary with wife Samantha on Sunday. He’s still not sure where his next deployment will take him - possibly Afghanistan, he says - but he hopes there will be more cookies waiting for him there.
For the Silvercrest bakers, who’ve already burned out two mixers in their fits of cookie production, the question of whether more cookies will come seems almost rhetorical.
“Of course,” Gilson said.
To contact Alex Cantatore, e-mail acantatore@turlockjournal.com or call 634-9141 ext. 2005.
Originally published in the Turlock Journal 4/17/2009.
Retrieved from the Turlock Journal Web site.