Christmas on the Globe

On the wall of the lobby of The Boston Globe's Dorchester offices a marble tablet reads: "My aim has been to make the Globe a cheerful, attractive and useful paper ... that it should help men, women and children to get some of the sunshine of life, to be better and happier because of the Globe."

Many things may have hanged at. The Globe since Gen. Charles H. Taylor, the paper's founder and first publisher (1883 to 1922) penned those words. But the 620,000-circulation morning daily still gives children and their families some sunshine every Christmas time with its Globe Santa charity.

While many other organizations provide food, shelter, health care or clothing for poor people in the Boston area. Globe Santa provides something different though equally essential last year the newspaper's holiday project raised $752,000 to buy Christmas presents for almost 50,000 girls and boys in 131 eastern Massachusetts cities and towns.

Globe Santa kicked off its 29th year the day after Thanksgiving, and in the pas weeks has every day run a story about children who wouldn't be getting Christmas present because their are poor, or alcoholic, or disabled, or dead.

The Globe makes a daily appeal for money, which then goes to pay for the dolls, football, ready bears and board games given to needy boys and girls younger than 14. The newspaper picks up the cost of administering Globe Santa, which includes renting warehouse space and paying a staff that numbers 20 in peak weeks.

"It's a terrible thing when you're got some three-day-old kid who believes in Santa Claus, and you have to go tell him there's no Santa Claus because his father's drunk," says Globe reporter Douglas S. Crocket, who has been working with Globe Santa for 24 years and says he was once a Globe Santa beneficiary himself.

Crocket writes up tragedies every day, stories about Chuckie, an 8-year-old autistic foster child, or 8-year-old David, whose penniless aunt rescued him from his mentally ill mother who threw dishes and chairs at him and his three sisters, or about 6-year-old Peter from a rundown public housing project who wrote to Globe Santa asking that his 4-year-old sister Martha get some dolls to play with.

It's a job perhaps gloomily reminiscent of Nathaniel West's Miss Lonely hearts, but Crocket says, "You don't get jaded. You just look at those kids. They're as sad as they were 24 years ago-they're as sad as they were 100 years ago."

To ask if Globe Santa can come up with a present for their child, families living roughly to within a 30-mile radius of Boston must write to the newspaper and have their letter countersigned by a social worker of clergyman registered with Globe Santa.

The program used to be run by the old Boston Post in conjunction with the mayor' charity When The Post folded in 1956. The Globe took it over.

These days, buyers begin stock-piling toys in April, according to Crocket, snapping them up at just nickels over wholesale price. The money raised this year goes to pay for the toys already purchased. At far as a fundraising target for this year, Crocket says. "You huge to do as well as last year [but] we don't set a quota."

A measure of how well-loved Globe Santa is in Boston in that over the years, according to The Globe, the average contribution has been less than $5. And from new until sometime in January. The Globe will be dutifully running out in agate sized type a list of all the people helping pay for toys for poor kids, contributors as varied as "Westwood Lions Club," "A repeating sinner,". "From the workers in the ECG lab at Mass. General Hospital." "To my rabbit, Stompper," and "From the purse I found and never returned."

And the contributors will help put something--something that wouldn't have been there otherwise--under the tree for kids like 3-year-old Susan whose father dead in September and lost all her toys when her welfare mother's apartment burned up last month, and orphan Mary Jo, whose father deserted her when she was born and whose drug addict mother left four years ago.

"If one kid gets something (from Globe Santa) that he would a" have at Christmas," says Crocket, "then as far an I'm concerned it's a success."