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Health & Fitness

Caterpillar Food Drive a Big Success

Residents of Joliet and surrounding communities reach out to help Caterpillar workers on strike.

Timothy O’Brien, president of Local Lodge 851 of the International Association of Machinists, had to make two trips with his full size pickup truck to transport all the food collected at Saturday’s food drive for Caterpillar workers. Normally he makes a couple of trips to the grocery store a week spending around $5,000 to stock his food pantry; this week he won’t have to make any trips.

Of the people who stopped several remain in memory. The two men who work as temps in Will County ware houses making minimum wages donating two bags of groceries; the woman who stopped to inquire what the food drive was all about, leaving and then coming back with bags of groceries; the farmer who donated groceries and then came back with a side of beef for the food pantry’s freezer and the elected Republican official from Will County who stopped to make a donation, which perhaps shows that some issues transcend ideological boundaries when they touch the core values of our Christian-Judeo heritage.

To all the considerate and generous people in and around Joliet who took time to drop off food or make cash donations and to the Universalist Unitarian Church for the generous use of their parking lot, a huge ‘Thank you’.

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Food for the Caterpillar workers can still be donated at:

Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., Teamsters Local 710, 9000 W. 187th St. Mokena, IL. 60448.

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Cash donations may be sent to IAM Lodge 851, 23157 S. Thomas Dillion Dr. Suite B, Channahon, IL 60410. Food donations may also be dropped off at this address.

Ron Kurowski

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