QUINLAN, Texas — Vernon Wells’ path to this East Texas hamlet (population 1,432) started at a Target store in his hometown of Arlington.
The Toronto Blue Jays cleanup hitter and his wife Charlene, along with several Texas Rangers players and their wives, met at the store three years ago to take 16 underprivileged children on a shopping trip.
They saw kids with filthy clothes, hollow faces and little hope. And when their Target tour ended, Charlene Wells could contain her feelings no longer.
“I held her while she cried,” Wells recalled Tuesday. “It was an emotional experience.”
It also made them decide to use their privileged station in life to help children in trouble. Soon they came to understand that the mothers needed as much help as their kids.
So Tuesday, on a day off from baseball, Vernon and Charlene Wells took up ceremonial shovels to launch a housing project for single mothers and their children on a wind-swept flatland near Quinlan, about 80 kilometres east of Dallas.
Wells’ Perfect 10 Foundation raised the cash — between $700,000 and $800,000 US, he said — to build two “quads” to accommodate eight families.
The buildings will sit on a 250-acre campus operated by Arms of Hope, a not-for-profit Christian organization that provides a self-contained community — including housing, a school, a church and counseling — for at-risk children and single mothers.
“That’s Vernon Wells,” a staff member told a group of young residents who attended the ground-breaking ceremony. “He plays baseball.”
Most of them did not know that. But they were impressed anyway, and they offered up scraps of paper, the shirts on their backs, the backs of their hands and even a dollar bill or two for Wells to autograph.
One child, desperate for something that Wells might sign, yanked off his running shoe and held it up. Others followed suit. One came away bragging that he had an autograph on both shoes.
For Wells, a child’s shoes brought to mind another story.
Back in his hometown of Arlington, just west of Dallas, he and Charlene took two boys to shop for “the bare necessities” during that outing in 2007. The kids lived with their mother in a cheap motel under the auspices of a government agency.
“We had a six-year-old and a three-year-old, both boys, brothers,” he said.
“The three-year-old didn’t say a word. He was attached to his brother. His brother pretty much took care of him.
“I remember kneeling down to take off the three-year-old’s shoes, because we were buying them shoes and socks, and I nearly fell over from the smell. His socks were black. You could see the day-to-day neglect that they go through.”
Wells and his wife were high-school sweethearts who grew up well-to-do and became unimaginably rich. They have two sons, seven and four. That night in the Target store, the contrast hit them hard.
“We had to take all the price tags off of everything so their parents couldn’t take them back and get money for drugs and things like that,” Wells said.
“It was an amazing experience. It opened our eyes to a lot of things.”
First, to the plight of the kids. At 23 per cent, Texas has the worst child poverty rate in the United States; five per cent of its kids are homeless. And ultimately, the Wellses realized the importance of keeping families together when possible.
Their research led them to visit Arms of Hope.
“It was a perfect fit,” Wells said.
As he discussed the decision, Wells kept talking about “breaking the cycle” of poverty. Nearby, 76-year-old Lucy Fullerton remembered how it happened for her, how she was brought to this campus when she was three and stayed until she was 18, how she went on to a good life, with a husband and four children — three medical doctors and a social worker.
“That’s not bragging,” she said, misty-eyed. “I know where that came from. It’s because people cared — I’m really so grateful, I feel like crying.”
Earlier, she had thanked the baseball player for caring. Wells said folks like Lucy Fullerton, and those kids he met Tuesday, help to keep him grounded.
“Ten years down the line, nobody’s going to care what I did (in baseball),” he said. “This is the opportunity to make an impact on a much grander scale. You start changing lives, you start impacting people from within, that’s where you make your mark in this life.”
He wears No. 10 when he plays. But why call his foundation Perfect 10?
“I think when you’re helping people,” he said, “that’s as close to perfect as you can get.”`
http://www.canada.com/sports/Helping+fa ... story.html
I know a lot of people rag on him because of his contract, but hes always carried himself well and he does a ton of charity work.
