Seeking her successor

Wanted: pull tab princess. Must love community service, like clowns and be willing to become obsessed with aluminum cans. Pay is in smiles and hugs.

That may not be exactly what Jenna Dunbar writes when she urges Centennial Middle School students to consider taking over her quest to collect pull tabs for the Ronald McDonald House, but it could be.

Dunbar, now a West Valley High School senior, started collecting pull tabs for recycling to benefit the Ronald McDonald House in the eighth grade. The Ronald McDonald House provides low-cost housing to families with children in the hospital.

“When I started, it was how much I could collect in the summer,” she said. “It just kept going. People kept giving me tabs. Then the Kiwanis joined in and it just exploded.”

Dunbar is known as the “pull tab princess.” People recognize her in stores, sometimes approaching her while she’s working bagging groceries at Yoke’s to give her pull tabs. Her years of effort finally led to her most recent milestone – collecting a ton of tabs. There are more than 2.8 million tabs in a ton.

Her next goal is to collect 5 million tabs, but Dunbar needs some help. She’ll go to college at Eastern Washington University in the fall, and she won’t have time to keep up the pull tab effort. She plans to visit Centennial Middle School soon to ask if any eighth-grade girl would be interested in wearing a multicolored crown of pull tabs.

Dunbar said she’ll be looking for girl who is committed to community service and can speak well in public. Anyone interested will have to complete an application, write an essay on why they want to be the next pull tab princess and do a live interview.

And about that obsession with aluminum cans. It doesn’t have to start that way, but it will happen. “It’s a habit now,” said Dunbar. “I can’t see a can without taking the tab. We’ve even pulled off the side of the road to pick up a can.”

Her partner in tab collecting has often been her mother, Karin Dunbar. “We’ve done some nasty things for cans, I’ll tell you,” she said. “We always carry sanitizer in our pockets.”

Right now Dunbar has tab collection down to a science. Much of it involves simply driving around to the banks, stores and fire stations that collect them for her. “I’ve got a halfway house in Texas saving them,” she said.

She appears at local events, often with Ronald McDonald. She rides in parades on a float containing all the tabs she has collected over the years (the tabs will be sold for recycling when the price is higher). The float was built by the Millwood Kiwanis.

The experience has taught her time management skills and how to be at ease in front of a crowd. “I used to have a hard time getting in front of people,” she said. “Now it’s no big deal.”

“I’ve seen her grow as a person,” her mother said. “Since she was a little girl, she’s always wanted to fix things. This is just the way she’s always been.”

It will be hard to pass on a project that has taken up so much of her time, but Dunbar is ready to crown a new pull tab princess.

“She’s going to be promoted to tab queen,” her mother said.