A dying boy and an elephant teapot
Young Fred Awtey was barely able to catch his breath at the family home in the small hamlet of Jenner’s Crossroads located along the Lincoln Highway in the Laurel Highlands. Freddy seemed too young at 13 years old to have a bad heart, but he did. The care he needed was well beyond the limits of the country doctors in rural Somerset County in the early months of 1930.
His mother, Sadie, and her mining engineer second husband, Charles Awtey, who had adopted Freddy, made arrangements to take the boy to West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh in the hope of finding a life-saving treatment for the newly turned teenager. The doctors told Charles Awtey that Freddy was was going to require an extended hospital stay. Awtey, thankful for having a job during the Great Depression, needed to get back to work in the coal mines, and Sadie had other children at home to care for. So, with a heavy heart, Charles said goodbye to the scared boy lying in a hospital bed all alone on a white-sheeted hospital bed.
After Charles returned home to Somerset County and knowing Freddy would be without visitors, he wrote Bishop Mann of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh a letter. The bishop, being moved by the father’s request for the people of Pittsburgh to send the ill boy cards and to possibly pay him a visit at West Penn Hospital, published the father’s request in the Diocese News in March 1930.
Thirty-five miles away at 404 N. Main St. in Butler stood the Dimmick family home. Kansas-born Ralph, a metallurgist at Armco Steel’s Butler plant, and his Ohio-born wife, Elsie, were members of St. Peter’s Episcapal Church on East Jefferson Street. The couple shared their large, wrought iron fenced clapboard Victorian-era home with their two sons. Inside the family home on a March day sat Elsie Dimmick sharing the plight of Freddy Awtey from their church’s newspaper to 12-year-old Ned and his six-year-old towheaded little brother Henry. The boys were touched by the lonely, sick boy’s father’s request for visitors and came up with the idea of earning enough money to buy him a present and deliver it to Freddy in person at West Penn Hospital.
The inspired young Dimmick boys went to work with boyhood enthusiasm. They cut grass, washed windows, ran errands and did other money making chores. The pennies, nickels and dimes they earned were dropped into the belly of a shiny, white, porcelain elephant shaped teapot decorated with an emblazoned red, green and blue riding blanket draped across its back until it was full.
But, sadly before they could purchase and deliver their gift to the boy in the Pittsburgh hospital bed, they were told the tragic news that on April 9th, 1930, 13 year-old Freddy Awtey had passed away. According to his death certificate, the sick Somerset county youth had died of “chronic malignant endocarditis.”
Less-admirable children may have spent the money they had collected inside their elephant teapot-turned-savings bank on a new baseball glove, Saturday matinee tickets at the Majestic or Lyric theaters, or maybe would have just splurged on soda pop and candy. But Ned and Henry must have felt that even though it was too late to help Freddy Awtey, they could still help others.
A year before the Dimmick boys had ever heard of a sick boy named Fred Awtey, St. Margaret’s Hospital in the Lawrenceville area of Pittsburgh had started a “Free Bed Fund.” It was created due to the economic hardships brought on by the “Great Depression” and the hospital realizing the urgent need to provide health care aid for those challenged by the severe economic circumstances following the stock market crash of 1929.
So, the two young Butler boys made a trip, most likely accompanied by their parents, to the Episcopal Church affiliated St. Margaret’s Hospital. Traveling with their coin stuffed elephant teapot, the 12-and-6 year-old brothers presented the hospital with all the money they had hoped to use to buy Freddy Awtey a new toy as a donation to St. Margaret’s “Free Bed Fund.”
After their initial donation, each time they earned $3.00 they would send a donation to the hospital to help other needy patients. Little did they know their initial act of youthful generosity soon would be the start of an annual pilgrimage by the children of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh for over five decades.
Bishop Mann, taken by the Dimmick boys’ story of selfless giving, conceived an idea to have each church in his diocese participate in a children’s pilgrimage to St. Margaret’s Hospital, bringing donations for the “Free Bed Fund.” Mann had the tale of the elephant teapot shared at each of his individual church’s Sunday schools to inspire youthful fundraising. Then five months after Ned and Henry had made their first donation to the “Free Bed Fund,” several hundred children and their parents in September (1930) made their first pilgrimage to St. Margaret’s Hospital.
The Dimmick boys’ teapot came to be the symbol of the annual charitable event held each fall at St. Margaret’s. By 1935, small wooden pink-and-blue hospital beds were given to participating Episcopal churches for the girls and boys of each parish to collect their donations. On the day of the annual pilgrimage, the children would set their little coin-filled hospital beds on each side of the altar of the hospital’s chapel.
Beginning in 1966, elephant-shaped banks replaced the miniature beds and were used by each church for their fundraising youths. Over time, the event included speakers, a 180-member choir (1966) and refreshments. One fall, a live elephant from the Pittsburgh Zoo arrived for the children to ride the “Free Bed Fund’s” live mascot.
The St. Margaret’s Annual Pilgrimage reached its peak in the mid-1960s with over 1,000 children participating and thousands of dollars being raised to help those in need. But sometime in the early 1970s, for reasons unclear, this amazing charitable event came to an end.
Today, behind the glass of a display case inside the lobby of the offices of the St. Margaret Foundation on Freeport Road in Pittsburgh sits the original elephant teapot that had once belonged to two young boys from Butler. Little could the Dimmick brothers have ever imagined in 1930 that their simple act of trying to buy a present for a lonely, dying boy that they had never met would start a ripple effect of inspiring thousands of children over five decades to raise tens of thousands of dollars to provide free medical care to those less fortunate.
Ned and Henry Dimmick grew up to lead very successful lives and continued to support the “Free Bed Fund” well into adulthood.
Ned graduated from Butler High School in 1934, and Henry followed six years later. Ned earned degrees from Penn State and Harvard Universities and early in his career taught romance languages and literature at both Harvard and Northwestern before beginning a 40 year career on the staff of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States in Washington, DC. A kind and humble man, he helped many underprivileged students with financial assistance to allow them to complete their college education. He passed away in Butler in 1995 at the age of 99.
Henry Dimmick served during World War II in Europe as a radio operator/gunner on a B-17 bomber, earning several medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross. He graduated from Penn State with a degree in chemical engineering in 1948. Following graduation, he began a career with Preston Laboratories and later was named president and CEO of its successor, American Glass Research. He died in 1997 survived by a wife and two children.
Bill May, of Butler, is a historian, speaker and tour guide.
