Allen Farley brought only socks and underwear for the national award ceremony in Virginia Beach, Va. The navy tie he wore was a gift from the staff of Arkansas Children's Hospital and he picked out the shirt, pants and shoes on a hurried trip to a mall the day before.
He wasn't nervous to speak to hundreds of people, not after braving podiums for the past five years drumming up support for Log a Load for Kids. But that tie really made him fidget. The last time he wore one was at his wedding nearly a decade ago.
Farley wears a T-shirt, jeans and Vibram-soled Danners almost exclusively, even as a resource forester at Green Bay Packaging in Morrilton, where he has worked since 1997. Farley's other work, volunteer chairman of Arkansas' River Valley Log a Load for Kids, is unpaid, also full time.
The Log a Load for Kids Foundation awarded Farley its 2014 National Log a Load for Kids Volunteer Champion Award on May 8.
Log a Load for Kids began in 1988 when a group of South Carolina loggers donated the value of a load of logs to their local children's hospital. It spread to Arkansas in 1993, and in 21 years, five chapters have raised more than $6.85 million for Arkansas Children's Hospital.
The program doesn't just donate loads of hardwood pulp anymore. Each chapter prepares all year for an event, a dinner and live auction. It's a fundraiser, but it's also the center of an enormous community web Farley and volunteers like him have woven. Guests range from weathered loggers and congressmen to Children's Hospital patients and families.
Farley himself founded the River Valley Log a Load chapter in 2009 after the Arkansas Forestry Association communications director, Anna Swaim, invited him to a fundraising auction. There, he saw a man buy thousands of dollars' worth of raffle tickets to win a four-wheeler, win it, put it back up for auction and walk out.
"That was my first introduction to how this world is and how to compound good on top of each other," Farley said.
It is a different world from what Farley grew up in, living in a trailer outside Mena. As a first-grader, smitten with Smokey Bear, Grizzly Adams and images of Yellowstone National Park, Farley hoped that he'd end up working in forestry. But the toilet bowl froze solid in the winter, and he remembers his mother sewing a piglet's face back together after a bobcat tried to carry it off. No one from his family had attended college, or so much as graduated from high school. His parents divorced when he was 12, and he moved in with his maternal grandparents.
"I had very good examples of what not to do, and how not to do it," Farley said. "That was a big motivation."
So Farley's brother graduated from high school in 1984, and Farley followed in 1986. The day after graduation, he left for boot camp in San Diego and spent the next four years traveling to Hawaii, Japan, Korea and the Philippines with the Marine Corps. In 1990, discharged and living in the back of an old store in Idabel, Okla., he survived working roofing jobs and watching his high school friends fall into a life of crime.
"I said, 'I am going to college, period,'" Farley said. "No matter what, I can hack it."
He loaded up a decaying 1981 Silverado he named Christine and drove to Stillwater, Okla. He parked off campus, found the Office of the Registrar at Oklahoma State University and asked the woman at the counter how to sign up for forestry school.
"She's like, 'Sir, you have to get admitted to college. You have to enroll,'" Farley said.
He earned his bachelor's in forestry in five years and spent most of those living dirt-cheap in a condemned house, sleeping with a hammer, watching for rats.
"I knew this was my shot," Farley said. "There is no Plan B. There is no home to go back to."
Farley said he purposefully latched onto people he believed would push him to succeed. He met Mark Fisher at church, and the two began a lifelong friendship. Farley said Fisher, who was working on his doctorate in chemistry at the time, made him turn off the TV and study.
Fisher, who is now a senior scientist at FLIR Systems, said Farley sought out ways to share his resources.
"When we were in school, obviously neither one of us had a lot of money," Fisher said. "But if anybody needed anything, he [Farley] was the guy that always tried to organize something to help."
Farley's ability to connect with others is what has made the River Valley auction in Russellville grow into a 700-person event and pushed Arkansas Log a Load for Kids to raise $500,000 last year.
For the River Valley event in Russellville, locals contribute whatever auction items they can: a helicopter hog hunt, coupons to 88 Truck Wash, an oversize John Deere tricycle, a handmade quilt, paintings by Pottsville Junior High's pre-AP art class, a hand-carved cedar chest. Often Farley thinks of ways people can donate before they do, promoting local business through the auction. And often it's not in cash.
You have a lawn service? Farley will hand-type a gift certificate for $20 off.
You own a nice camera? Have you thought about donating a free session of family portraits to Log a Load for Kids? Farley will ask.
You make stuffed animals? What about auctioning a custom-made Log a Load for Kids teddy bear?
"He asks people to participate and he asks people to donate their time and talents. Allen is fearless," Swaim says.
He does it for Children's Hospital and the quality care he'd want for his 8-year-old daughter, Aspen, should she ever need it. But there's more to it. He starts telling story upon story of people opening up for charity, and he can hardly finish his sentences. He's so excited. It's "layering good upon good."
"All you gotta do is make a spark," he said. "Just a spark, then whoosh. It just goes. Every so often you may have to fan it, just a little bit. Then it just goes."
The River Valley Log a Load for Kids event will be held Sept. 13 at the Boys & Girls Club in Russellville. To find out more about the five state chapters of Log a Load for Kids, visit www.arkforests.org/logaload.html, or contact Anna Swaim at [email protected], or find Log a Load for Kids -- Arkansas on Facebook.
High Profile on 07/06/2014