BENTON, Ill. — As a lifelong baseball card collector, Greg Poole almost couldn’t believe that the shiny T-205 Christy Mathewson Gold Border was sitting on his desk. This gem would have been a Holy Grail card, had he ever allowed himself to believe he could one day own a card that cool, that rare, that significant in the hobby.
As amazing as it was to own the card, though, he was even more excited to sell the piece of cardboard gold — slabbed as a PSA 3 — in the right moment. But for Poole, it wasn’t about waiting for the market to peak and cashing out. No, owning that card meant that when a need arose, he’d be ready to help. It didn’t take too long.
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Poole, through his non-profit, Can’s Can, heard about two non-verbal children who would benefit from having iPads with Proloquo2go, an app that helps with daily communication and building language skills. When the request came in, Poole never hesitated.
He sold the Mathewson on eBay for $1,925, using the money to buy the iPads and the software for each kid. That was always the point of buying the Mathewson. It was never to own a piece of the hobby for long. It was to, at some point soon, help someone he didn’t know.
Yeah, Greg Poole is a special person. This is what he does. He uses his favorite hobby (baseball cards) to fund his passion (helping others). Like any collector, his goal is to buy low and sell high, but his motivations are far more altruistic.
The Mathewson, he bought as part of a lot of vintage cards in an estate sale auction, along with a few other T-205 and T-206 cards, and others like late 1950s Topps Willie Mays and Hank Aaron cards. Another estate sale find helped him open the Can’s Can HQ in his home town of Benton. That auction lot, he bought because it had a couple of cards listed of Doug Collins and Jerry Sloan, NBA players-turned-coaches who grew up in the area.
Turns out, at the bottom of the smelly grocery bag was a 1933 Goudey card of Babe Ruth himself, with a kid’s name written on the back. He sent it off to Beckett to get graded/authenticated, and it came back graded 1. The sale of that card (a little over $4,000) allowed him to buy display cases and shelving for the store, and help with rent costs, too.
At first glance, Can’s Can HQ looks like most any local card shop.
The four display cases in the front room are full of baseball, basketball and football cards for sale, with sealed hobby boxes and blasters mixed in. One shelf holds unopened boxes from the nostalgia-rich Junk Wax era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the shelves on the opposite wall hold Funko Pop and other assorted action figures. Another two tall, skinny display cases hold autographed items, such as baseballs, football helmets and basketballs.
It’s a relatively small space, just 20 x 12, and it’s only officially open from 9 a.m. To 1 p.m. On Saturdays. This is no ordinary card shop, though, because 100 percent of the proceeds from the shop — and Poole’s eBay store, and his display case at the County Seat Antique Mall right off the town square — are funneled back into the community. And not just in some vague way. Evidence of the commitment is only steps away.
On the other side of the wall from the St. Louis Cardinals bobble-heads — located in Southern Illinois off Interstate 57, Benton is mostly split between Cardinals and Cubs fans — is the Teacher Resource Center. The shelves in this room are stocked with supplies for teachers, from pre-K on up through high school. You name it, it’s here: colored pencils, markers, erasers, post-it notes, pencil bags, notebooks, bottles and sticks of glue, construction paper, sanitizing wipes, Play-Doh, staplers, pencil sharpeners, binders, paint, zip-loc bags, scissors and on and on.
For teachers, everything is free.
Yep, you read that right. Absolutely free.
Down the hall, there’s a similar room. This one’s stocked with shelves of books, backpacks, toiletries, toys, headphones and more teaching supplies. Teachers are welcome to “shop” here, too. So are foster parents and their kids. Again, it’s all free. And the shelves here are never empty. Poole won’t allow that to happen.
Sports cards got me through some of the hardest parts of my life. Now we are paying it forward. Here’s an awkward and unprofessional short walk though of what we do. @CardPurchaser @ryanfagan @Topps @dacardworld pic.twitter.com/kRAgPWpFSC
— Greg Poole (@Canscanministry) March 26, 2023
I’d heard of Poole’s work, but I wanted to see for myself. The cynical journalist inside had to be satisfied before I decided to write about a person who seemed almost too good to be true, so a few weeks ago I made the two-hour drive from my home in St. Louis. What did I find out? If anything, Poole had been vastly underselling his non-profit’s impact on the region.
“You know, Greg Poole for president! He wouldn’t want that, but he’s just such a blessing to our entire Benton community," said Nicole Garrett, the executive director of Heritage Woods, an assisted living facility that benefits from Can’s Can. "And he reaches outside of the community too. Everybody knows that if he's involved, it’s going to be top notch.”
Poole, 38, started his drive to help his community when he was 16. He has few peers when it comes to working hard to help others, and to rally others to pitch in. But self-promotion, it quickly became clear from our conversations and conversations with others about him, is not his strong point. He’s working on it, though, because as people keep telling him, the more people hear about what he’s doing, the more people will want to help and donate.
“Greg’s not in this for Greg,” said Lee Messersmith, the new mayor of Benton. “That, to me, is what makes this so cool. He helps where he can, when he can, however he can. And at the end of the day, he just wants to see other people be better and do better.”
Poole grew up in Benton. He met his wife, Courtney, when they were both 16. His full-time job is in IT with a local school district. Courtney is a teacher and coaches the high school girls golf team. They have two kids, Emy and Max. Poole’s parents, Gary and Mary, and Courtney’s parents, Patti and Dan, are involved, too.
“Honestly, this isn’t work at all. Sometimes it is, but for the most part, I get to have my hobby, share my hobby with others, but then I also get to help others,” Poole said. “The important thing is, my kids are up there. My parents are up there. My wife and her parents are up there. It’s just something we do. It’s a family activity.’
It’s a family activity that makes an impact on the entire Southern Illinois region.
‘There’s no hidden agenda here’
The experience of doing a meals-on-wheels program through a high school program stuck with Poole. When the pandemic settled in during the spring of 2020 and folks had to stay home, it was an inconvenience for some but a legitimate problem for others. Poole, of course, stepped in where he saw a need.
Twice a week, Courtney and his parents whip up home-cooked meals. Poole delivers them on Wednesdays, and his dad typically takes the Friday route. These meals bear little resemblance to standard meals-on-wheels programs around the country. The portions are huge — for most senior citizens, enough for two meals — and come with some sort of treat, like a big slice of freshly made pie.
Starting our shut in meals this week with Italian Beef. #thehobby #canscan pic.twitter.com/vTq3aXU8Zw
— Greg Poole (@Canscanministry) April 25, 2023
One of Poole’s favorite stops is to deliver meals to Rusty, who has Down Syndrome. Without fail,
Ranking the Junk Wax years of baseball cards, from 1987 to 1993Places on the route — there are 30-plus stops now — are in high demand. For example, it wasn’t too long ago that an elderly woman on the route died, and Poole was the one who found her.
“We went to deliver her food and she was on the back porch,” Poole said. “And to tell you the need, she was not in the ambulance yet and my phone was ringing, with someone saying, ‘Does that mean there's a spot open on the list?’”
Yep, what he does matters. Especially in a place like Benton.
“I lived outside in Naperville for 10 years. There’s a lot of infrastructure in a place like that, a lot of the civic organizations, community organizations,” Messersmith said. “But those aren’t down here, and the needs are twice as great, but the resources are even that much less. Greg just goes, ‘People need to be fed at home? OK, we’ll do a weekly meal.’”
Messersmith, who was sworn in as Benton’s mayor on May 2, has helped Can’s Can with an annual bike giveaway. He owned a bike shop in town, Cycle 1, so he had access to bikes at wholesale cost. Poole reached out because several teachers had asked about possibly getting bikes for students who had the need. A partnership was formed.
Instead of just giving the bikes to the kids, they took a more subtle approach.
“With a bike giveaway, we always want to handle people with dignity,” Poole said. “One of the things we did would be to have the teacher do a bike drawing and put a bunch of pieces of paper in the drawing and then say, ‘Oh, Tommy won the bike!’ Well, Tommy was the one who was going to get it, but it’s not like, ‘Tommy here's your free bike because your parents don’t have money or whatever.’ It's ‘Hey, you won this. This is yours.’”
Messersmith was on Benton’s Chamber of Commerce for years, then served a term on the City Council before winning the mayoral race in early April.
“Being the mayor gives me the ability to highlight organizations like this, and really saying, ‘Hey, Benton, these are these are the kind of organizations we need to rally around,’” he said. “Franklin County is one of the more depressed counties in the state, one of the lower-income counties in the state.
“Having an organization like Can’s Can helps when somebody asks, ‘Is there anybody we can hand that money to?’ Yes, there is. ‘Is there somebody that we can go talk to?’ Yes, there is. ‘Is there somebody that understands what the needs are in our community?’ Yes, there is.”
Poole works with several foster agencies in the area, too. He’s bought dozens of beds for foster kids, and social workers and foster parents — and their kids — are welcome at Can’s Can HQ, where one of the back rooms has books and toys they can choose from. And Poole fills Christmas wish lists for the kids, too, when funds are short for the foster parents.
“My background’s ministry, a lot of serving and leading in churches,” Messersmith said. “And what Can’s Can does is a lot of what churches could do, but most churches don’t do, for whatever reason. That’s what makes this organization great. It really is about others, 100 percent. Any chance I get, I like to talk about it. It’s pure. There’s no hidden agenda here.”
‘I’m here for something’
The most obvious question is simple: Why?
Why would someone so completely devote their lives to this, starting so young? The story starts before his 16th birthday. Growing up, Poole and his friends loved collecting baseball cards. All his quarters and dollars went to his hobby, mostly spent at Fielder’s Choice, a local card store in the nearby town of West Frankfort.
“It was a great shop, and the guy was fantastic to deal with kids,” Poole said. “You could ask stupid questions. I would go in there and buy 25-cent Dennis Rodman cards, and he treated you the same as the guy that came in that spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars.”
As time went on, Fielder’s Choice began to become something of a safe haven for Poole. He was abused by someone in the community for years, off and on, starting when he was only 6 years old. Instead of speaking up and telling his parents — they had no idea, thought he was just a quiet kid by nature — he held it inside. It ate him up.
Being in the card shop, and looking at his baseball cards were some of the rare moments when he was happy. It wasn’t enough, of course. When he was 16, he decided he was going to commit suicide.
“My last thing that I was going to do,” Poole said, “I sold a whole bunch of stuff. I had done meals-on-wheels all through high school, and I went and bought food for all those people on our route. That was going to be it for me.”
He was not successful in his suicide attempt.
Poole got back in his car and looked at a couple of five-row boxes of baseball cards sitting there.
“I thought, ‘Well, I’m here for something.’ And ever since, that’s what I’ve done.”
Poole decided he was here to serve. And that decision, the internal, unshakable commitment to helping his community in any way possible before he was even out of high school, produced a ripple effect that’s still being felt across Southern Illinois.
That decision is why foster kids all over the area have new clothes to wear, and new beds to sleep on. It’s why Ashley Willmore’s fifth-grade class at Frankfort Intermediate School in West Frankfort has a laminator, and why Emily Milligan’s band at Ewing High School has a trombone. It’s why Sue Baker at the Heritage Woods assisted living facility in Benton has a hand-painted headboard, adorned with her favorite colors. It’s why 30-something adults who can’t leave their houses on their own have home-cooked meals twice a week. It’s why countless kids from lower-income houses have new bicycles.
It’s why trying to find all the ways that Can’s Can has made life better for those in need in and around Benton is a damn near impossible task. The unofficial motto for Poole and his family is, “Yeah, we’ll do that.”
There are not ways he will not help, only ways he hasn’t helped yet.
“I think part of that comes from that feeling of being kind of forgotten about, or left out or trying to deal with things on your own, and you probably can't do it, you know? It’s needing somebody there, not knowing how to ask,” Poole said. “We don’t ask questions when needs come up. I don’t need your story. If you tell me you need help, we’re gonna get you help.”
Above and beyond
At Can’s Can HQ, the card shop opens at 9 a.m. On Saturdays. That’s the same time the Teacher Resource Center opens, too, and there are always teachers ready to thank Poole for helping them stretch tight — or non-existent — classroom budgets. Depending on the time of the school year, as many as 50 show up, some driving an hour or more.
I emailed a handful of teachers about Poole, and their responses told the story.
“Greg’s teacher resource room has been a wonderful asset to pull from,” wrote Laci Norton, a fourth-grade teacher from Benton Grade School. “His resources and supplies have helped fill my classroom in ways that I would not have been able to do on my own. Getting a classroom ready for students is really expensive and a bit overwhelming.”
Kristin Odom also teaches fourth grade at Benton.
“I am sitting here looking around my room,” she wrote, “and I keep thinking. ‘Wow, that’s from Greg’ and ‘That is also from Greg.’ There is not a doubt in my mind that without what he has been able to provide me for my students, I would not be able to teach as efficiently. Students right now need to be engaged, feel safe, and have their basic needs met to be successful, and Greg has allowed me to do these things.”
As you can imagine, word spreads quickly in the teaching community. At last count, Poole’s teacher program had helped more than 340 classrooms, in 67 different school districts.
Gretchen Conley, a first-grade teacher at Ewing Grade School, heard about Poole from colleagues. She wrote that she’s been teaching for 33 years and can’t remember anyone doing anything remotely like this.
And Poole is proactive, too, said Emily Milligan, who teaches music and band at Ewing Grade School.
“Greg actually reached out to me after seeing a post I made on Facebook a few years back needing instruments for my band,” she wrote. “My school does not have a lot of funding for our music program but we do provide 100% of the instruments students play in our band. Greg immediately bought a trombone for me as he said he wanted to help
“I believe around 50 percent of our school is on our free and reduced lunch. To be able to attain that, your household income must be pretty low, so to ask our students to rent or buy instruments at Ewing is not a true possibility. Some could, most couldn’t. Greg not only helps find me used instruments but also supports my other programs with materials for general music and choir. I am not given any funding by my school so I reach out to Greg when I am in need.”
Before he places a large Amazon order, he’ll email asking whether anyone has requests. Going above and beyond has become the normal.
“My favorite example of how Greg has helped: During my first year of teaching, a student in my class desperately needed a winter coat right as we were about to hit a cold snap,” Odom wrote. “The student really needed a new wardrobe, but the coat was very important. Greg not only provided the coat, but he also stocked this kid's wardrobe. I will never forget how excited this student was every day for the next couple of weeks. The student came in every day to show off his new shirts. He not only had his needs met, but this student also had a new level of confidence that can only come from feeling better about yourself.”
‘We’ve got it down to a science’
The same way Poole understands how to stretch a dollar to help a teacher — he’s in more couponing groups than he’d probably care to admit — he understands how to turn a dollar spent on baseball cards into more down the line.
The cards for sale are all from his collection. He’s an opportunistic buyer, searching estate sales listings and scouring Facebook groups and shopping for deals on eBay. He knows the market, too, and understands the value of hitting on a prospect before the prospect hits it big. As was the case with the estate sales that produced the Mathewson and Ruth cards, an easy way to boost the value is to get the card graded.
For vintage cards like those, even low grades are huge, because then the card is authenticated. But when the pandemic happened and seemingly every collector in the world sent in their cards to get graded, costs and wait times mushroomed.
“It was nice for a while, until it just bogged down to the point that I couldn't afford to have big-ticket items out for a year,” Poole said. “For me, it was easier just to sell and move on. I could buy and sell multiple times before I would get something back from PSA. And honestly, while all that was going on, I was kind of cautious because I kept thinking, man, it can’t be this good forever. I was thinking, if I send this off to get graded and the market crashes in six months before it comes back, I’m in trouble. Kind of took a pause on grading.”
The pandemic was a weird time. The hobby exploded, as folks who were shut in rekindled their childhood passion for collecting, and with nothing else to spend their money on, prices skyrocketed. For Can’s Can, that meant an influx of cash, which meant an increase in the ability to help. And that was good, because during the pandemic, more people needed help.
“The best example of how weird pricing got is this: I had found a Russell Wilson Topps Chrome, a variation that I bought for $2.50 and had it in the case for $6, but couldn’t sell it. So I put it back in the box,” Poole said. “Then, I saw a couple of them selling for $200 to $300 on eBay, and I was like, absolutely. I couldn’t sell it the year before and someone bought it for like $996 on an eBay auction.
“So instead of feeding 30 people through the week, we were feeding 70 or 80, and I wasn’t sure that we’d be able to continue that, and then, hey, someone in New Jersey pays $1,000 for a card I couldn’t sell for $6 and, ‘OK, we’re good again.’”
Another way to boost value: Through-the-mail autographs. Poole sends out hundreds of cards and requests, with a little explanation of what Can’s Can does. The response is often a bit overwhelming. For example, he sent former MLB pitcher Mark Gubicza three cards to sign, and Gubicza sent back 10. Recently retired Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim sent back more cards than he received, too.
Former MLB infielder Glenn Hubbard sent a stack of signed 1984 Fleer cards, and every collector from that era knows that’s the iconic card with Hubbard holding a python. Former basketball players Muggsy Bouges, Eric Montross, Fred Hoiberg and Cherokee Parks have all recently sent back autos. There’s a box in the shop filled with similar autographs.
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Poole has learned that the sales of $5 to $10 cards are helpful, too. Because here’s the truth: He looks at cards differently than most people. For Poole, selling a Jordan Walker Bowman refractor — in Southern Illinois, the Cardinals prospect has been good business this spring — for $30 means he can buy a 30-pack of Elmer’s Glue Sticks for teachers. Selling an ungraded Ronald Acuña Jr. RC means another couple of packs of colored pencils.
“We’ve got it kind of down to a science,” Poole said, “to where somebody might say, ‘Hey, I need X, Y and Z’ and I know I’ve got card X, Y and Z here in the case that I can sell.”
There’s no card too small for Poole. He even uses the commons. He’ll package them together and distribute the “packs” to teachers (to use as prizes), to the libraries (as rewards for summer book reports), to local sports programs (as post-game celebrations) and even to the local sheriff’s department; they’ll take them along and sometimes hand to kids on domestic dispute calls. He’s given away, by his estimate, more than 5 million cards — Pokemon, too (those are Emy's favorites) — over the years.
Making repacks tonight! Love giving out free cards to kiddos. #thehobby pic.twitter.com/PskbaJoGoD
— Greg Poole (@Canscanministry) May 5, 2023Can’s Can takes donations of baseball cards, money or literally anything he can sell or use to help someone, and as a 501c, the donations are tax-deductible.
Mixing the two worlds — collecting and charity work — can be a bit confusing for some.
“We’re just so oddly paired. For people in the hobby, there’s a lot of skepticism about us, just giving it away, especially during the pandemic, when everybody was just making boatloads of cash,” Poole said. “And then the people we talk to in philanthropy, they’re like, ‘Well, what does this (baseball card) part do? I don’t understand that.’ Well, this is how we pay for it.
“I don’t like saying, ‘If you donate $10 you can feed …’ but I can say, ‘You want to buy a 1988 Jordan for $40?’”
By the way, Poole came up with the name Can’s Can, way back when he was 16. The idea was that, in addition to selling baseball cards to fund his work, he also collected cans and other recyclable items to raise money. And, truth be told, he wasn’t comfortable talking about the reasons behind his passion for charity work, so he basically framed it as a community project involving recycling.
It’s been a long time since recycling old soda or beer cans has been part of the equation, and Poole jokes that the name reminds him of the “Simpsons” episode where Homer and his friends are trying to think of a name for their barbershop quartet. Principal Skinner says this line: “We need a name that seems witty at first, but seems less funny each time you hear it.”
“That’s kind of where that name is at now in my brain,” Poole said with a laugh, “because it’s like, man, I’m 20 years in and it’s not as funny now as I thought it was when I was younger.”
‘Bigger and better’
One day, Poole was looking through the paper and noticed an obituary that used an old driver’s license picture, because there apparently weren’t any other good photo options available. Poole thought to himself, “That can’t happen.”
An idea was born. Every single resident at Heritage Woods, an assisted living facility just up the road from Poole’s shop, would have a portrait session, courtesy of Can’s Can. He reached out to a friend, photographer Stephanie Smith, who grew up in Benton but lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Poole explained the need — portraits for roughly 100 residents, with two prints each, in a session that would be lengthy — and she gladly came home to help out.
“She gave me the cost and it was like, OK, so then you go to the treasure chest and you just try to match up cards to the cost that you're going to have,” he said.
What he found was a 2009 Steph Curry Topps rookie card. It’s one Poole had opened back then and held onto, because you never know. He’d gotten it graded a few years earlier — it was a PSA 6 — and this was the moment it was meant for. He sold it, and that covered the bulk of the costs, both Smith’s fee (a special price point, of course) and two frames for each resident.
“Those portraits, oh my gosh,” said Lana Ray, Heritage Woods’ director of sales and marketing. “They were amazing. I mean, they just turned out beautiful.”
Most of the portraits were taken upstairs, where natural light from big windows filled the room. But for the less-mobile residents, Smith came to their rooms and did the portraits there.
Nobody was left out. That’s the Can’s Can way.
“They were priceless,” said Garrett, the executive director, “because a lot of people had not had a professional picture taken in so many years, so it was priceless to them and to the family. The families were so thankful for that.”
Poole never visits Heritage Woods empty-handed. Like, literally never.
The day I tagged along, he carried in a couple of 12-packs of Angel Soft toilet paper and a jumbo box of adult diapers. He’s greeted with smiles, as always. Because the card shop is open on Saturdays, he visits during the week. When they can, the kids come along. As Poole said — and Ray and Garrett vouched for — there are few things his boy, Max, enjoys more than jumping on the lap of one of the residents for a ride on their Rascal scooter.
The four of us are sitting at a table in a conference room at Heritage Woods. Garrett looks over at Poole and says, “I don’t know where you came from, but I wish the world had a lot more like you.”
She’s not alone. Heritage Woods has residents of different income levels; some are private pay, and some are on Medicaid. Those residents only have, Ray said, an average of $90 per month from Medicaid to spend on items like toiletries, Dish TV and phone. That goes quickly, so Poole makes sure to bring a steady supply of the necessities. Sometimes just with the drop-in, but also with what he calls “free market” days, when he brings in large quantities of just about every necessity, and residents take what they need.
Free of charge, of course.
When he started doing Christmas Wish lists (more on those in a moment), he noticed residents put different items of clothing on their lists. So he decided to have a Clothes Day, when he brought in racks and racks of clothes — most donated, some purchased with baseball card proceeds — and let the residents choose anything they wanted. For some on the fixed incomes, Ray and Garrett told me, it was their first chance to have new clothes in years.
“He brought in those round racks like you see it stores and it looked like a store shopping area out here,” Ray said. “And again, we just let them loose and they just start taking things off the rack and whatever they want is free. And of course during those events, there’s snacks and toilet paper and toiletries and all that there too.”
And then, there was Jewelry Day, aka the Bling Party.
They still talk about Jewelry Day at Heritage Woods, almost in hushed, reverent tones.
“With Greg, it’s always bigger in reality than what it is in your mind, and that’s typically not the way things go,” Ray said. “Usually you have something built up in your mind way bigger than what it’s going to be and it’s the opposite with his organization. It always ends up being bigger and better.
“We had six-foot-long tables and larger, just full. I mean, you couldn’t put your finger down on the table where there was not a piece of jewelry.”
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The jewelry was donated, in large part, by the teachers who are helped with school supplies. It’s part of a community circle of giving that Poole has created, unintentionally maybe, but beneficially. When Poole asks, people respond.
“He makes people want to help,” Ray said.
And then there’s Christmas. You can’t talk about the Can’s Can and the Heritage Woods connection without talking about Christmas. For the residents without much in the way of family, it’s a lonely time of year. Poole has done his best to bring a few smiles the past few years. With Ray’s help, every resident gets a wish list.
Even the ones who don’t fill it out get something. And the residents who have filled out Poole’s wish lists before, well … “They’re getting more comfortable with what they ask for,” Ray said with a laugh. “Things like big screen TVs, requests for furniture, tablets, iPhones. I’m like, do I need to kind of pull them back a little bit? I’ll have no problem doing that if I have to issue guidelines. And he says no.”
There was, though, one resident who asked for a Lexus. That one, Poole needed a bit of clarification on, and it turned out, the request was actually for an “Alexa,” the Amazon device. That was easy.
And because it’s Poole, the gifts weren’t just dropped off in plastic bags in front of the residents’ doors. Not at all. Delivery includes elves and everything.
“I can't stop talking about it because, just the details they put into everything. It was just amazing,” Garrett said. “All of a sudden all these cars pulled around, and everybody starting bringing in stuff and putting it by the tree. It had been wrapped, people had put special time and love into the wrapping of the presents. Some people don't get any presents, so to have them wrapped perfectly and with detail? Such a blessing.”
‘There are still needs’
I spent most of that afternoon in Benton. Just seeing his operation, and talking with those he helped, felt a bit overwhelming.
I asked Poole if he slept much, considering Can’s Can is essentially a full-time job, on top of his actual full-time job. Not really, he admitted. He doesn’t look stressed, though, and maybe that’s just his nature. He gets to have his hobby, and he uses it to help people.
At 38 years old, 22 years into his community project, this is who he is.
Even though it felt like a dumb question, I asked anyway during one of our follow-up conversations. Why is he still doing this, 22 years later?
“Well, there are still needs,” he said, matter-of-factly. “We’re in an economically depressed area. And, I get to be with my family. It doesn’t take time away from them and it’s something we can do together, so why not? Everything comes together. Sometimes it runs tight, but we’ve managed to be there.”
He paused.
“So why wouldn’t we do it?”
That’s an excellent question.
———————
Want to help?
Can’s Can has poured more than $500,000 into the Southern Illinois region over the past two decades, with the lion’s share coming from the sale of baseball cards (and related items).
If you’d like to help, Can's Can has a website with a donate button. Give him a follow on Twitter, too.
