Benny Westcott
A retired nurse, 52-year-old Stephanie Lewis loves helping people. “That’s just me. I like to do things like that,” she says.
When she first moved to town in 2019 there were 25 kids in her Quince Street neighborhood. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she would make monthly activity packets for the kiddos who no longer went into school every day because of statewide mandates. Additionally, Lewis would give them bubbles and Morse code bracelets of their name, as well as a new book for Christmas.
But now she says 90% of the kids have moved away and she doesn’t have kids to make packets for anymore. So Lewis channeled her do-good spirit into another venture of her own creation.
In February, she started the Small Town Big Heart Pull Tab Challenge. The concept is that people donate the pull tabs often found on cans, and the money earned from recycling the tabs goes to the Ronald McDonald House, which helps families financially while they have a sick child in the hospital.
Lewis dropped off collection sites at places like NAPA Auto Parts, O & M Point S Tire and Auto, Shoppe of Wonders, and Ridgeway Health. The businesses give her what they collected from the public. At the end of the year Lewis will have the tabs weighed by Sweet Home Sanitation and then drive them down to the Springfield Ronald McDonald House, the closest such house to Sweet Home. Down in Springfield, a metal recycling company will weigh the haul and then pay cash for the weight of the metal. That money goes to the Ronald McDonald House in the name of Sweet Home. Lewis says about 1,000 of the pull tabs equates to one pound, and a pound of the pull tabs raises approximately 50 cents. She already has several large containers of donated pull tabs at her house.
NAPA Auto Parts has collections from five of its stores that are being given to Lewis.
“When I picked up, they said you might want to bring a truck,” she recalled. “They had milk jugs and five gallon buckets full of them.”
Lewis also has an aluminum ash can on her front porch at 1332 Quince Street where tabs can be donated, in addition to the aforementioned businesses. Sweet Home City Hall is also a drop-off spot.
“This is a little bitty effort that can go to something so good,” Lewis said. “Something with little effort like this can help pay for their costs to stay [at the Ronald McDonald House]. So they don’t have to worry about a hotel and can concentrate on their sick child.”
Every year Lewis’s goal with the Pull Tab Challenge will be to do more than the previous year.
“Sweet Home has a big heart,” she said. “And with this I just want people to see that a town can come together and make such a little effort but such a big difference in the families of sick kids. It was just a simple little thing I started, but I want to do it all the time now.”
She noted that a family on her street has had to use the Ronald McDonald House.
“It makes such a major difference for a family that’s worried already,” Lewis said. “It takes that worry off their plate.”
And people shouldn’t have too much trouble getting their hands on pull tabs to donate.
“Pull tabs are on everything,” Lewis said. “Even canned vegetables nowadays.”
She hopes to draw even more attention to the project by starting a competition for who can collect the most pull tabs in the Sweet Home schools.
Lewis grew up in the small town of Warrenton, which is near Astoria on the Oregon coast.
“I’m from a small town, so I love Sweet Home,” she said. “My husband and I love it. We have the best neighbors in the whole town. We’re partial though,” she said with a laugh.
Lewis is a retired nurse who started in Washington and moved to Oregon. Her last gig before retiring was with Kaiser Permanente.
When she and her husband decided to move back to Oregon from Washington, Lewis specified that she wanted to be less than an hour and a half away from her best friend, who lives in Dallas. Her husband took a protractor to a map and found that Sweet Home was within that range.
“He said, Lake Foster, I like fishing, let’s look for a house here,” Lewis recalled. Now the couple is fishing for pull tabs too.
Those with questions about the challenge can reach out to Lewis on her cell phone at 503-468-9718.