Foulkeways Residents Pitch In to Combat COVID-19

Residents at Foulkeways at Gwynedd are doing what they can to the keep their retirement community virus-free. But, for some, that’s just not enough.

They couldn’t sit helplessly in front of their televisions, watching the death toll rise. They needed to help. But how?

Then, last week, a resident named David Long got a call from his son, John, who said that he and his managing partner Howard Moed were about to buy 10,000 high-quality surgical masks from China for half the going price.

“We were going to cover the $26,300 for the masks out of our business profits,” said John Long, who is president of LLBco, a firm run by the Long family for three generations.

“We were going to give them away. I thought about my parents living at Foulkeways. I thought they (Foulkeways) could use some.”

They could. But what they really needed was an opportunity to pitch in and help. So, David Long called “a few friends” at Foulkeways at Gwynedd. Within hours, the idea had spread through the campus like, well, like a virus.

“Not one of them turned me down,” David Long recalled. “They said to me, ‘we’ve been looking for something to do’. They were all excited. We were able to raise more than $10,000 right on this campus. We’re just a great big family here.”

The Long’s spent a few anxious days this week waiting for the shipment to leave China then, finally, tracking it through a four-day odyssey along an international route.

“It was gut-wrenching,” David Long said. “I had told the residents it would be here in a day or two. I used FedEx tracker and we saw that it was just lying there in Shanghai. Then, by golly, we saw it had moved to someplace else in China, then to Alaska and then to Memphis and on to Ft. Washington.”

Where John Long was waiting to pick them up. He and Moed delivered 150 of them to Foulkeways at Gwynedd Friday, his first stop. By dark, they had delivered all but a few hundred of the masks to eight hospitals as far apart as Temple University and Reading, PA. and to other “frontliners” in the anti-virus fight.

“We put stickers on each box thanking our frontline workers for all they do,” John Long said. “Then we put them in our trunks and started dropping them off. My brother Chip (Dr. Charles Long) is at Abbington Hospital, we dropped some there, my good friend Mary McGinley who is working the tents at Johns-Hopkins, her sister who is at Children’s Hospital got some.”

Meanwhile, John Long said, contributions continue to pour in now covering about 2/3 of a bill he and his partner were more than willing to pay from their profits.

He excused himself for a moment to answer the door for some first responders from the Tinnicum Township police department.

“I’ve been waiting for them,” he said when he returned to the phone “Gotta look out for them. They’re our local department.

“The masks will all be gone soon. But that’s what they’re for.”

For that and to give some residents at Foulkeways at Gwynedd a chance to do more than sit idly by watching a tragedy unfold.