'Hillbilly angel' crusades for charity

PUYALLUP — Mary Damron, a tiny woman dressed in jeans and an oversized T-shirt, takes the microphone shoeless and without her dentures, and the room falls silent. It's a long way from the "hollers" of West Virginia, where she grew up dirt poor, believing she was so worthless and ugly that it hurt people to look at her.

Part-missionary, part motivational speaker, the 4-foot-10 Damron, 48, has become a crusader determined to see to it herself that the world's poor children never feel as unloved as she once did.

As the folksy, charismatic spokeswoman for a charity that delivered 5.2 million shoe boxes of Christmas gifts to children around the world last year, Damron crisscrosses the country, speaking to some 300 groups a year, and says she won't stop her crusade "until the Lord calls me home." Yesterday, it was a small crowd at Bethany Baptist Church in Puyallup. Today it's Northshore Baptist Church in Bothell.

The woman, known as the "hillbilly angel," has traveled to Bosnia, Kosovo, Nicaragua, Honduras, Macedonia, Albania and Croatia delivering boxes of gifts for Operation Christmas Child, a charity started by Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham.

Mama Gump Mary Damron, the spokeswoman of Operation Christmas Child, will speak at 7 tonight at Northshore Baptist Church, 10301 N.E. 145th St. in Bothell. For more information, call Sarah Pierce at 253-572-1155.

Normally shy, Damron becomes impassioned on stage. The Puyallup crowd is instantly captivated; some are in tears. She grabs a stuffed dog out of a shoe box and tells them that any child in a desperate situation — even a teenager — needs something like this to hang onto and love.

"They'll even start talking to it," she said.

She has been honored at the White House, which is why her kids started calling her Mama Gump, a moniker that has stuck. The life of the diminutive woman, who hates wearing shoes as much as her false teeth, could indeed be a movie along the lines of "Forrest Gump," a film about a simple person who stumbles into fame.

During the Bosnia war, Damron heard Franklin Graham on television asking people to put together a shoe box of toys, candy and toiletries for the children in the war-torn country.

Damron went around her "holler," a poor neighborhood in Ikes Fork, West Va., and collected more than 1,200 shoe boxes in 1994. She then drove them to Graham's headquarters in Boone, N.C., and announced, "Brother Graham, I'm Mary. Gotcha some shoe boxes fer God. Where do you want 'em?"

Graham, who dedicated a chapter to Damron in his book "Living Beyond the Limits," said he was stunned that a poor woman would go into the impoverished surroundings to help the children in Bosnia. He invited her to help deliver gifts in Bosnia, her first overseas trip. The next year, Damron collected more than 6,000 shoe boxes and was becoming a local celebrity.

Operation Christmas Child is part of Graham's nonprofit organization Samaritan's Purse, an international relief organization that eases suffering and evangelizes. Shoe boxes of gifts totaling $10-$15 also include a pamphlet on Christianity, and group members readily acknowledge these shoe boxes are a means to reach more souls.

The shoe boxes, collected each November, have been delivered to children in more than 90 countries, including those living in dump sites in Nicaragua, others dying of AIDS in Romania, and orphans in Haiti and Afghanistan. This Christmas, the group hopes to send shoe boxes into Nepal, Chad, Chile, Columbia, Ethiopia and Yemen.

Damron said all children love balls, paper, pens, coloring books and pictures of the gift giver. Sometimes, she said, these shoe boxes can work miracles, such as the time she tried to reach a 5-year-old girl in a Bosnian village who had lost her parents and brother in the war. The girl, found in her home among the dead members of her family, was taken to various refugee camps before landing in an orphanage in Bihac, where Damron met her sitting in a corner almost catatonic.

Damron said that for two hours she showed the little girl shoe boxes — some with barrettes, a teddy bear and doll. But the girl wasn't interested. Then Damron said she prayed that she could find the right box and gave the little girl a box with a pair of pink shoes that perfectly fit.

"I saw a little smile come across her face," she said. "It was like something dead coming back to life."

She said the little girl, sitting on a three-legged stool, just started giggling, putting one shoe out at a time to stare at it.

"That's what a little box can do," Damron said. "How long would it take for a psychiatrist to do that?

Bobbi Nodell: 206-464-2342 or bnodell@seattletimes.com.