The all-female Good Friends charity couldn’t have picked a better time to eclipse the important $2.5 million milestone in money it has raised to help the working poor.

It came Tuesday during the club’s 25th anniversary luncheon.

As a dozen male Santas passed around large sacks, the club’s largest turnout in 12 years – about 820 members and guests – threw in $120,223.17 in 71/2 minutes. The take was down from last year’s $133,154, but carried the club over its milestone of money that has helped 28,000 needy people and families in Mecklenburg County over 25 years.

“We focused today on what we’ve accomplished in 25 years, and I felt the spirit in this room was very high,” said Patty Norman, the group’s president and one of its four founders. “The numbers show we’ve helped an awful lot of people, and we’re very proud of that.”

The crowd at Grady Cole Center was overflowing, with extra tables set up on a stage and three dozen members sitting in bleacher seats eating their lunches as they listened to the program.

Norman said the group has tried to keep dues low, $55 a year, but recruited sponsors and members to make donations to offset the $20,000 annual salary it pays an employee to distribute money to clients.

“Because some of our members donated to that, it may explain why we didn’t see as many larger checks as we have in the past,” she said.

So long, Fellows

Before Good Friends, a small group of women were invited to the all-male Good Fellows Club luncheons, but they had to sit in the back behind half curtains.

That began to gall some women. So in December 1987 four Charlotte women – Norman, Alice Folger, Sally Saussy and Catherine Browning – called the first luncheon of the Good Friends to order at Christ Episcopal Church on Providence Road.

The lunch drew 415 women and raised $32,205 – twice their goal.

Since then, the women are often asked why they don’t try to merge with Good Fellows.

Always the response: “If you have a husband and wife sitting together at a luncheon, there’s no way we’d raise the kind of money both these groups have raised,” Browning said.

During last week’s yearly Good Fellows luncheon, the men broke records in turnout and money raised to help the working poor.

“There’s no way we can compete with them,” Norman said. “They have so many more members.”

Women’s struggles

Tuesday, before the male Santas were dispatched to collect donations, Ophelia Garmon-Brown rose to speak to the crowd.

She is an expert on the working poor, growing up fatherless (he died when she was 2) in public housing in Detroit.

Yet when Ophelia was 13, her mother moved the family to Bertie County in Eastern North Carolina, where she was raised on a farm – and where Ophelia experienced the discrimination that her mother had fled. She, too, toughed it out and became a physician, Presbyterian Hospital administrator and ordained minister.

Tuesday, she told the crowd about the “courage and perseverance” of Helena, a mother of three sons who’d asked Good Friends for help.

When her youngest was a baby, Helena’s husband left for the summer to play reggae music with a traveling band. He promised to come back at summer’s end, but didn’t, Garmon-Brown said.

A year later, he returned and wanted to spend a summer with his older sons. The youngest was still in diapers.

She relented. But again, summer ended and the father didn’t bring back her sons. She looked everywhere for them, but her husband moved the boys around. Ultimately, she and the youngest moved to Charlotte to live with her mother and sister and her sister’s family.

Agencies found her a two-bedroom apartment. Then, recently, her husband contacted her and asked her to care for the older boys – temporarily.

“Once she got her boys back, she vowed to never let them out of her sight,” Garmon-Brown said. “Her apartment was congested, but Helena doesn’t care. It is clean and full of love.”

Now she’s about to move into a three-bedroom apartment with Good Friends’ help.

“When we went to her apartment as Good Friends representatives, she had tears in her eyes,” she said. “She was so incredibly grateful for people like yourself.”

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