Toys for the Corps
Ted Shaffrey
NEWPORT BEACH -- Newport Beach Yacht Club president Terrance Phillips
can’t wait for the Marine Corps to drop anchor tonight.
“I’m up to my ears in toys here,” Phillips said. “Everywhere I look, I
see toys.”
The 377 members of the yacht club have managed to collect nearly 2,000
toys for the Marine Corps’ annual Toys for Tots program, including
everything from bicycles to Lego sets.
“If you brought in a toy, you got a free drink at the bar,” Phillips
said, pointing to that temptation as the reason the drive was so
successful.
Tonight at 6:30 p.m., retired Marine Corps Brig. Gen. J.W. Hubbard and
his son, Lt. Col. Clint Hubbard, will meet Phillips, along with other
club members -- including Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackaukas --
under the club’s grand-sized outdoor Christmas tree to receive the fruit
of members’ labors.
Soldiers will load the toys onto a truck and they’ll be taken to the
Marines’ Toys For Tots warehouse in El Toro.
“We expect to have maybe 200,000 toys there,” said Scott Mather of the
Council of Orange County Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which screens
social service agencies for the Marine Corps toy program.
The toys will be given to various Orange County social service agencies,
Mather said, including boys and girls clubs, church pantries and the
Salvation Army, so needy Orange County families can begin receiving toys
as early as Monday.
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