Lions Gear Up for White Cane Drive

In a corrugated metal shed just off Monterey Park’s Garfield Avenue sits an odd-looking contraption made of cast-iron wheels, pulleys and long chains.

It is idle for most of the year. But come autumn, it is the lifeblood of a 40-year-old Lions Club tradition observed throughout the United States.

This is the one-and-only White Cane Days machine, the Monterey Park Lions Club’s claim to fame. Lions clubs in 40 states, from Alaska to New Jersey to Florida, sell miniature canes made by the machine to raise money for Braille libraries, glaucoma tests, vision screening for youngsters, even cornea transplant surgery for those in need.

On a sweltering afternoon recently, the machine vibrated and whirred as it cranked out thousands of tiny white plastic canes, dipped their ends in cherry-red paint and then dropped them onto an aluminum chute. One by one, they slid neatly into brown paper sacks.

As longtime Lions members Don Mummert, 78, and Clare Smith, 82, watched, Raymond Frost, 71, filled hundreds of orders from all over the country for coin collection containers, colored balloons, sticky White Cane Days labels, and of course, boxes and boxes of canes.

In the coming weeks, millions of these three-inch canes will be worn by anyone who donates to the Lions drive.

Monterey Park Lions break even on the sale of their canes to other clubs. Their income depends on donations and sales to the public. Last year, they collected $5,800. In all of California and Nevada, Lions collect about $1.25 million each year during White Cane Days.

Helping restore vision has been the Lions’ mission since 1925, when Helen Keller inspired the club to help those in need of eye care. Two years later, that purpose gave birth to the now distinctive white cane, which was invented by a Lion in Peoria, Ill., to give the blind more mobility.

But the Monterey Park Lions Club is where White Cane Days began. In 1951, members of the club were brainstorming ways to raise money for vision projects and came up with a novel idea: Using pipe cleaners and paint, they made miniature replicas of the red-tipped white cane that had come to symbolize blindness.

The Lions scheduled the first White Cane Day for September to coincide with the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, when heavy traffic would pass through Monterey Park along Garvey Avenue. In those days, motorists still were unfamiliar with then-new San Bernardino (10) Freeway.

Lions stood along the road and sold to drivers stuck in fair-day gridlock. They raised $500.

By 1954, more than 100 clubs ordered bulk quantities of canes, sending the Monterey Park club scrambling for a faster way to manufacture the canes.

Using $1,000 in club money, Gribble and Lions President Johnny Johns invented a machine that spun the plastic rod through heated water and wound the softened material around pins on a large iron wheel. The twisted rod was cut into cane-shaped pieces, dipped into red paint, then dropped onto a constantly moving chain to cool and harden.

Several years later, Gribble and Johns updated the machine and added an electric eye that counts the canes as they make their way down the conveyor chain at a rate of six per second, 22,500 per hour.

So far this year, 566 clubs have placed orders for canes, Frost said.

But some clubs have more lucrative ways to make money. The Ventura Lions Club owns a parking lot next to the Ventura County Fairgrounds and raises funds by charging parking fees.

Friday and Saturday, Lions will put on their trademark marigold-colored Lions shirts and white pants, set up collection stands and blow up hundreds of helium balloons to hand out.

“We go all out,” Smith said. “This isn’t just a Mickey Mouse thing. It’s a big proposition.”