Gimme That Soda Can Top

Families coming together to help others — and honor the memory of a matriarch — kinda gives us a lump in the throat. Such is the case with the Kwasnofski family of New Jersey, which just donated a staggering 121 pounds of soda can flip tops to the Ronald McDonald House of New Brunswick — finishing the work of their grandmother who died in May.

For three years, Eleanor Kwasnofski almost obsessively collected the flip tops. She got the idea after reading a newspaper article about how they could help cut down the cost of putting up families when their children are hospitalized at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

"She would chase you if you had a can with a tab on it," Melanie Hatrak, one of her grandchildren, explained to The Star Ledger and added, “Everything she did, she did for someone else.”

Kwasnofski died of lung cancer before she could donate all her tabs, but her family quickly stepped in and finished the job. Last Thursday, they handed over 121 pounds of tabs, enough to fill five 5-gallon water jugs, about a dozen 20-ounce pretzel jugs and various other plastic containers, bags and boxes. Three generations of the Kwasnofski family were on hand for the donation, eight family members in all, and they took a picture of their work before they loaded their treasures onto an SUV and drove it to the Ronald McDonald House.

All those tabs yielded a modest $57 (at a rate of 47 cents per pound), but the Ronald McDonald House says the effort the family put into completing the project is priceless.

"I thought it said a lot about the family and what their grandmother meant to them," Kathy Dennis, the house manager at the charity, said of the donation.

We wholeheartedly agree.

Photo courtesy of The TruthAbout... via Flickr