Shoe display shows souls lost to smoking
Grandma always wore that pair of shoes to take long walks with her grandchildren. Then she died of cancer.
Dad liked to slip on these old sneakers for a game of ball with his kids, before a stroke took his life.
Organizers of a "Kick Butts Day" lined up about a thousand of those shoes outside the Armstrong County Courthouse Annex on Wednesday. Each pair represents one of the 526 lives lost in the county to tobacco-related illnesses in 2003.
That's how many area residents died from stroke, heart disease, respiratory disease and cancer that year, according to Pennsylvania Department of Health statistics.
"These statistics are about real people," said Kay Owen, executive director of ARC Manor, a nonprofit agency dedicated to the prevention, education, intervention and treatment of abuse and addiction to alcohol and other drugs such as tobacco.
ARC Manor was one of the participants in a statewide campaign held each April to draw attention, create awareness and educate the public to the health effects of smoking.
On April 25, the shoes of local residents will be part of a culminating event on the Capitol steps in Harrisburg where 20,000 shoes will be displayed representing the 20,000 Pennsylvanians who die every year due to tobacco.
"We're trying to drive the point that it's not just numbers," she said. "It's people's moms, dads, aunts, uncles and grandparents."
To go along with the shoes, ARC Manor collected tobacco stories about how tobacco has affected area lives.
"She was the grandma you could only dream of having," said one writer whose grandmother, a smoker, died at 62. "Cookies, fun, calming down mom and dad so you didn't get into too much trouble, shopping, long talks about life and love of the Lord -- except for the smoking, all grandmas should be like her."
Another related how a father finally quit after many years of smoking. Thirteen years after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died that same year.
"He used to say he hoped he had quit soon enough," the person wrote.
It wasn't easy for another writer to watch a father die.
"To wait for his last breath. That's exactly what I did."
A granddaughter wrote, "If she could have seen the tears that her great-granddaughter, 5 at the time, cried, I think she would have tried harder to quit."
Owen's mother, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer.
She remembers riding in the car as a small child with her sister and yelling for mom to open a window. Many times they talked to her about quitting but were never able to reach her.
"She was too closely tied to her cigarettes," Owen said. "It's a powerful addiction."
Owen still gets tears in her eyes thinking about her mother gasping for breath.
"It's agonizing to the families who have to care for them and watch them die," she said.
Amanda Cochran is a tobacco-specialist counselor at ARC Manor.
Her dad, 51, is disabled from the effects of a two-pack a day smoking habit. He's quit. "But he had already done permanent damage," Cochran said.
"He used to hunt and ride 4-wheelers," she said. "He's not allowed. He's not allowed to lift his six grandchildren either. His comment was to put the old dog on the porch."
Gary DeComo, a district judge active in drug-prevention programs, noticed that most people who come before his court with an addiction also used tobacco at an early age. They are the ones more likely to use harmful drugs later, he said.
"The addiction process starts with tobacco," DeComo said. "If we could get to the kids early, we might not only reduce deaths from cancer and heart disease, we might also reduce long-term addiction."
Added Owen, "Tobacco is a gateway drug."
"If kids are allowed to smoke, it's their first (time) at being able to do something illegal and get away with it," she said. "It's easy to take the next step, to think maybe they can drink, then take drugs, and get away with it."
