Pantry Plus More is delivering smiles—and it has nothing to do with food.
Most of the time, the Mountaineer Food Bank keeps Pantry Plus More flush with supplies to combat food insecurity in Mon County. But one day during the last week of July, an urgent call to Pantry executive director Tom Bloom wasn’t about food. The food bank had five pallets of dolls it needed to move, and the staff thought Bloom was the right guy to handle them.
At first Bloom thought he’d be dealing with 50 or so dolls, but when the Pantry took receipt of the pallets, volunteers realized that they now had 549 Menche on the Bench Ask Bubbe Talking (Jewish) Grandma Dolls on their hands.
Because the Pantry doesn’t have much storage space, Bloom and the team were forced to deal with the dolls as quickly as possible. They headed out to Marjorie Gardens July 30 for a planned food giveaway. Volunteers took 50 dolls, too, just to see what would happen. “The kids were thrilled to have a new toy,” Bloom says. “One boy even grabbed me and said it was the first new toy he’d ever had that talked to him. Sometimes we need to learn from our children. They had no bias, no preconceived notions. A toy is a toy, and it simply made them smile.”
Since then, Bloom’s been all over town handing out Bubbes—the Yiddish word for Grandmother. At one point, he was schlepping 100 or so in his backseat, each offering “Oy vey!” or any of 11 other common Bubbe phrases every time he hit a pothole. Townies can appreciate how much advice Bloom’s been given over the past week. The Pantry team has dropped off Bubbes at synagogues, handed them over to kids at food drives, and delivered dolls to hospitals and several nursing homes. Adults are even asking for them now, too.
At the time of this writing, the Pantry still has Bubbes on hand, and Bloom has taken to calling himself “Hanukkah Hank” for the time being. “We’re teaching people about a culture that they may never have experienced before. It’s a great Mitzvah for me.”
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