By By Mildred Wallace

Copyright berkshireeagle

A sprightly little lady with a warm heart and great sympathy for ill children is one of the biggest boosters of the Bobby Kidney Sunshine Club, which will be conducting its annual fund drive Friday and Saturday.

Mrs. Elsie Wells, who makes her home at the Edgewood Rest Home, spends a great deal of her time making scrapbooks for children who are in the hospital. If the letters she’s received from various hospitals in and out of the city are any indication, she has been very successful in diverting the attention of these children from their illness.

She feels that the work of the Bobby Kidney Sunshine Club in cheering shut-ins is also very important. The club sends Christmas gifts, flowers, birthday cards and home movies to shut-ins and provides televisions and personal visits.

Mrs. Wells has been making scrapbooks for four years, mostly Christmas ones, she says, although she makes a few at Easter time. She spends a lot of time searching for just the right pictures to appeal to children, and is careful when snipping them from Christmas cards, catalogues, magazines and anything else that contains pictures she can use. She keeps them all carefully separated in boxes until she’s ready to get going with paste and scrapbook.

Her scrapbooks usually have very gay cutouts on the cover, with each page inside specializing in one thing, such as babies, dolls, toy trunks, other toys, animals, snowmen, Christmas candles, winter scenes and the like. Mrs. Wells also has made scrapbooks for small children of friends and relatives, and has made them for doctors’ offices. She is compiling three to send to relatives in Texas and one for her hairdresser to send to a nephew in California. She’s probably made 25 so far this year.

According to Mrs. Wells, if more people worked at things like this, “they wouldn’t be having so many troubles.” She contributes scrapbooks for the yearly bazaar of the Unitarian Church’s handicapped class, of which she’s been a member for nine years. “I wouldn’t miss a class,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing.”

Mrs. Wells has received letters of thanks from all three local hospitals, the Springfield Shriners Hospital, Children’s Hospital Medical Center of Boston, Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., Boston Floating Hospital, Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, and the Children’s Cancer Research Institute.

In fact, it seems that her scrapbooks are so popular with the small fry that there was one child at Hillcrest Hospital who didn’t want to go home after he’d recovered. He didn’t want to leave the scrapbook behind.