She said she had cancer, and neighbors opened their wallets. Then a stranger’s email raised questions
ARDSLEY, N.Y. — It was a small town, so small that it wasn’t officially a town, but a village tucked inside the municipality of Greenburgh. Occupying 1 square mile, and counting only 4,600 souls, it was a commuter’s dream: a tight-knit hamlet just north of Manhattan, seemingly immune from 21st-century isolation. As the deputy fire chief put it, “You know, it’s like living in a fishbowl. Everybody knows what’s going on.”
So it didn’t take long for news of the diagnosis to spread. A mother of two boys at Ardsley High School told the football coach she had cancer, and the football coach told the president of the booster club, and the president of the booster club told the deputy fire chief. They hardly knew the woman in question — Shivonie Deokaran and her boys were relatively new to town — but these men knew they needed to help. The story was all too familiar: She had only 18 months to live. Her cancer treatments were exorbitant — and you could imagine all those debts falling on Deokaran’s teenaged sons once she was gone.
First, they held a raffle. But then Rob Wootten, the president of the Ardsley Panthers booster club, and Rick Thompson, the deputy fire chief, came up with a more ambitious plan. The amount raised on the sidelines of football games — that would be seed money for a fundraiser big enough to tackle serious medical bills. It would be a spaghetti dinner to end all spaghetti dinners.
Wootten and Thompson were buddies at the local Department of Public Works. Wootten was younger, and more of a ham, a teller of dad jokes both dirty and clean. He knew everyone, and was constantly guffawing, slapping backs, shaking hands. Everyone knew Thomspon, too: He had the kind of smile that puts you at ease. He’d owned eateries from the tri-state area down to Florida, and even now, after leaving the business, he was still known among the firehouse volunteers for his chicken oreganata.
Together, they made a good fundraising team: One could wrangle a crowd and the other could keep it fed. The Greenburgh town supervisor had already helped a GoFundMe page for Deokaran, which had quickly generated over $10,000,
