Support mounts for Kalispell boy

Edgerton School students and office workers learned something about local generosity the past couple of weeks:

When you put out a call for pop tabs, be prepared for a response.

To be precise, 260 pounds worth of response.

After a story ran in the Daily Inter Lake on Oct. 23 about Trent Martinez and his friends Lacie Fischer and Lexy Boschee, the community apparently was galvanized.

Nine-year-old Martinez is undergoing treatment for a rare cancer of the sinus cavity at the Eugenio Litta Children's Hospital with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

He lives with his mother, stepfather and brother in Kalispell, but stays in Rochester during his lengthy treatments. He and his mom, Rachel Mann, were lucky enough to get a room at the Ronald McDonald House while there.

Ronald McDonald Houses nationwide offer a program in which friends and families of patients can pitch in by collecting pop tabs on the patients' behalf. The Ronald McDonald foundation recycles the aluminum and converts it to cash donations.

Edgerton fifth-graders Fischer and Boschee wanted to help their friend, so they launched a schoolwide pop-tab collection drive.

Little did they know just how far that drive would go.

Over the following two weeks, senior citizens and children, school supporters and complete strangers all popped their tabs into the bin for Martinez.

The principal's office reported that one Whitefish man brought in a wheelbarrow full of them.

This past week, a woman from Libby mailed a big box of the pop tabs.

Immediately after the story, calls and e-mails started pouring in from people wanting to know how to donate their stashed tabs.

Dozens of people across the Flathead Valley have contributed to the cause.

"They just keep coming in," Edgerton office manager Jeannie Shea said.

"People come in off the street and say, 'We saw the article in the paper and we want to give you these.'"

In the two or three weeks before the story ran, Fischer and Boschee had collected 21,866 pop tabs from their fellow schoolmates.

But with such overwhelming and immediate response, it wasn't long before the girls had to quit counting individual tabs and tally them by weight.

Just during October, they accumulated 260 pounds.

Today, they are tracking the growing donations on a bulletin board so the whole school can see their progress. Martinez himself is getting a chance to watch it while he's home for a couple weeks. He heads back to Rochester on Nov. 15 for more tests and potential treatment.

Fischer, Boschee and company have no intentions of stopping until they have their friend back for good.

"We'll continue until Trent's through this," Shea promised.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com