A Homemade Safety Net: Fruit Jars and Fund-Raisers Try to Save a Life : Community: A cancer-stricken Colorado woman needs $200,000 to ransom her future. Neighbors and friends raised half of it--and their appreciation of each other.

ESTES PARK, Colo. —  The flier, distributed in the first days of 1991, came directly to the point: “This week marks the start of our campaign to save a life.”

Save a life. Words more suited to battlefields and burning buildings than a simple sheet of paper found in a mailbox on a peaceful Monday morning. Seldom do ordinary folks in an ordinary place get such a chance. But the 7,000 people of Estes Park were asked to make a difference, to go out of their way, to be counted.

Jan Modeland, dying of breast cancer, needed $200,000 to pay for a bone-marrow transplant--no guarantee of survival, but her only hope. If her neighbors could help save her life, there would be no medals or rewards, just the quiet satisfaction of gently nudging fate.

So the accountants, the bankers, a handful of ladies who lunch, the couple who can’t afford a house, the draftsmen and the builders, the guy with the bulldozer, the gal who sells booze, the checkers at the grocery store, the waitresses at the cafes, the clerks at the lumber yard, the dress-shop owners, the fellas at the gas station, the vet, the high school baseball coach, set out with their ideas and their fruit jars to raise the money.

Today, Modeland, a 38-year-old self-employed surveyor, lies in a sterilized room. She is bald from chemotherapy and pale from pain, but she is coming back from the brink. She survived the excruciating transplant procedure and slowly, oh so slowly, is recovering because of something intangible in the human spirit, unfathomable in the human heart.

Dependent on the kindness of strangers and the love of friends, she got her chance because she got the money.

Not all of it, but enough to get her through those hospital doors. A local bank is safeguarding $100,000, and this woman who never lost hope still believes the rest will come.

Somewhere between zero in the savings account and a six-figure kitty, somewhere between the bingo game and the rubber-duck race, this town discovered that every person does count.

In helping a single cancer victim, Estes Park found its own collective goodness as well as the needed money. The campaign to save Jan Modeland has temporarily dampened enthusiasm for everyday civic squabbles. Even the letters to the editor about barking dogs and the school board seem more mellow.

Such solidarity inspired a huge outdoor garage sale in January (another miracle: it didn’t snow), a crafts festival in February, a talent show in March, an art show in April and untold other efforts by local businesses. It even lured CBS’ “48 Hours” to town after an Associated Press story chronicled the crusade.

Jan Modeland was just like countless others who frantically plot how to raise enormous sums to buy a future. Price tags for kidney, heart, liver, pancreas, lung and bone-marrow transplants range from $50,000 (kidney) to $240,000 (liver) and up.

Experts guess that three out of four transplant candidates eventually find ways to pay through insurance, government programs or family and friends. The rest--all those who fall through the cracks--are victims of the medical system as well as their disease.

Until January, Jan Modeland was such a victim.

“I used to have a $2-million insurance policy with a company I previously worked for, but when I went out on my own I converted it and didn’t check the fine print,” Modeland said at the start of the fund-raising drive. “My insurance dropped to a lifetime limit of $110,000, and I’ve got less than half left. . . . I feel caught in a squeeze. Not only do I have to fight the cancer, I have to plead for money just for the chance to save my life.”

Jan Modeland needed a Good Samaritan. She found hundreds of them. The first was Tammy Rumley, a 30-year-old title-office manager.

“I’d known Jan five years and she’d become one of my best friends,” Rumley said. “One day at lunch, we talked about where her life would end up if she didn’t have the operation. I kept thinking, ‘This could be me. What would my family and friends have done if this had been me?’

“There was no choice in my mind. I had to help. And when word got out, my phone rang off the hook with people wanting to help. So we formed a committee. Isn’t that what you always do when you have a problem? I’d never been involved in anything this far out of reach, just the annual fund drive for the volunteer fire department, where we usually raise between $5,000 and $10,000. But we had to start somewhere, so we rounded up fruit jars and cut holes in the lids.”

Volunteers labeled 130 quart jars with pleas for donations, then passed them out around town. Only two businesses refused to display them. Only three jars have been stolen. The rest have collected nearly $3,000 in four months. Marge Spomer, the mother of Jan Modeland’s roommate, Darcy Spomer, makes the rounds every day to pick up the donations.

“Sometimes when I go in a business and the jar isn’t full, they’ll open the register, take out money and say, ‘Here, I’ve been meaning to do this so I might as well donate now,’ ” Marge Spomer said.

“At first, we thought we could just get the money from the government, or from rich people who would be kind and just give it to us, or from some big event, like with the (Denver) Broncos, but we soon found out there wasn’t going to be a miracle fall from the sky or drive up the road,” she said.

“We have learned through this experience that you have to make your own miracle, you have to do it by yourself. That’s scary, but it’s also a great experience. People have come together in this campaign who would never have known each other or been friends, and now they love each other.”

The money winds up on Rose Hersh’s desk at Park National Bank. She keeps the books, safeguards the money and makes sure the get-well messages reach the patient. She even scrounged $1,848.93 from a shopping mall wishing well.

“Nobody wanted the money because it was filthy from being in the water, but we figured we could fix it, so we got a janitorial service to fill up 10 20-gallon buckets with the coins, and the fire department volunteered to bring the buckets to the bank,” Hersh said.

A score of people spent a three-day weekend running the coins through a concrete mixer to clean them with sand and solvent. Then the volunteers washed the coins, laid them out on towels spread throughout the bank, and dried them with hair dryers.

The bank didn’t have a coin counter, so a volunteer shuttled them to another bank in Loveland, 35 miles away, to be processed. The old coins went down the mountain and new bills came up to be deposited in the Modeland account.

That account is not a testament to Estes Park alone. About $40,000 came from Modeland’s hometown of Alva, Okla. But $60,000 came from the efforts of a Rocky Mountain town that would not let a citizen die without a fight.

“Why did we do it? Because we could. The worst thing that can happen when a friend or relative is critically ill is to stand by and do nothing. Jan needed help, and the hardest thing for her to do was ask for it,” Hersh said. “The least we could do was give it to her.”