‘Hats From Home’ going to troops

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — Every once in a while, soldiers get a chance to take off their helmets and relax.

So the employees of Stevens Pierce and Associates CPAs want to help them keep their heads warm and to let them know the folks back home are thinking of them.

Jill Trowell, an employee of the agency, submitted a news item to the Times-News two weeks ago asking people to donate baseball caps as part of a campaign called “Hats From Home.”

By Thursday, there were more than 2,000 caps of every color sitting in the accounting firm’s offices. More than half of them came in during the first week alone.

“Our community is so awesome,” Trowell said. “Something like this, when it touches home, they really respond.”

Parents of a daughter who recently died donated her hats to the effort, and one man donated his entire hat collection — six boxes worth, Trowell said.

The goal of Hats From Home is to collect 150,000 caps. The first caps will be sent to local soldiers recently deployed.

“This is such a fun project,” Trowell said. “I’ve had a ball doing it.”

The local project began after the agency’s owner, Ruth Pierce, read about the campaign on the Internet.

Hats From Home was the brainchild of a man named Richard Kingdon of Churchville, N.Y.

In April, the part-time deputy sheriff and retired high school physical education instructor sent some of the dozens of hats he’d collected as a college football referee to his son’s Marine unit in Iraq, according to the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y.

Hats From Home was born.

“The soldiers like to receive the hats to wear on their day off,” Kingdon said in a news release.

So the employees of Stevens Pierce and Associates decided to join the campaign.

“We called the gentleman in New York and just ran with it,” Trowell said.