Navy vet gathers cards, sends holiday wishes to soldiers

An e-mail from her
grandmother sparked the Christmas card project.

By HAROLD GWIN

VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — Dalene Marie Scott remembers what it was like to be in the military and away from home over Christmas.

That’s one reason the four-year Navy veteran and Youngstown State University senior created her own Christmas card drive to help cheer wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Scott, 28, was a cook on the aircraft carrier the USS John F. Kennedy and remembers the Navy providing bins full of cards from schoolchildren, church groups and individuals who just sent holiday cards to the military, asking that they be given to active personnel.

“I took as many as I could,” Scott recalled. “It was really so uplifting. It made you feel so good.”

Scott, daughter of Dalene Scott in Washington State and the late Jack Scott, grew up in the Mahoning Valley and graduated from Fitch High School in Austintown, after which she immediately entered the Navy.

Navy blood was in her family, she said, explaining why she made that decision. Her father and maternal grandfather, Aubrey Hemming, were Navy veterans.

The four-year stint also made her eligible for the GI Bill, which is helping pay her way through college in pursuit of a degree in business management.

Her grandmother, Barbara Hemming of Clarkston, Wash., always sent her cards on holidays while she was in the military, she said.

“I think she just knew how much it meant to me,” Scott said.

It was her grandmother who sparked Scott’s decision to launch the Christmas card project.

She sent Scott a recent e-mail that included the address of where to send cards to wounded veterans at Walter Reed.

Scott, who works as a student programmer in the Student Activities Office at YSU, began asking other office workers to sign cards for the veterans.

She made it easy, offering a variety of card choices — from the traditional to Dr. Seuss and Charlie Brown versions — for people to just pick up and sign.

For those who didn’t know what to say, she prepared some comical inserts of military humor, including the a list of the “Ten Military Traditions,” which included, among other things, “Gluing Santa’s beard to your gas mask.”

She also got support from students, mostly those in the Greek system she knew through her positions as co-chairwoman of Greek Campus Life and president of the Panhellenic Council.

She eventually collected a large shoe box full of cards and mailed them to Walter Reed on Friday.

It may be the start of her own Christmas tradition, Scott said, noting that she’s always tried to do something for someone else over the holidays, from helping to serve meals in a soup kitchen to pulling names of children from a gift tree.

“It’s jut a good way to give back,” she said.

gwin@vindy.com