Two years ago, Mike Sheridan of Drexel Hill was in Boston on a job, painting the outside of a Holiday Inn, when the unthinkable happened. It was the end of the day, he was cleaning up and took a step backwards and found himself hurtling through the air into an empty swimming pool.
Sheridan remembers the fall. He clearly remembers trying to move his body so he wouldn’t land on his head. “I wanted to land on my feet,” he says. Instead, he landed on his back, sustaining the descriptively named burst fracture of his L3 vertebrae. His back bone literally exploded, shooting shards of bone into his spinal column.
After the impact, he lay motionless, his mind probing the sensations—or lack of them—in his legs. “I couldn’t move,” he says. “I couldn’t feel my legs.” His brother jumped into the pool after him. “ I asked him to move my legs for me and he said he was already moving them. But I couldn’t feel it.”
Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital operated several days later—making no promises that Sheridan would ever walk again. But the operation was successful. The removed the bone fragments from his spinal column, shored up his back with titanium rods and sent him home, after a stint in rehab. He still has no feeling in his left leg and, except for that leg, he’s in constant pain.
But Mike Sheridan isn’t telling his story for sympathy. He doesn’t think he needs any. “I consider myself lucky,” he says. “People have been really good to me over these past two years.”
He’s recounting it to explain why, this year, he has the time to travel all over Delaware County collecting coats for the needy. “I have all the time in the world now,” he says. “I haven’t been able to work since I was injured. I just wanted to spend my time doing something good.”
So he launched “Mike Sheridan’s Winter Warm Up,” a campaign to collect new and gently used coats for the homeless and the people who have fallen down on their luck in what seem like luckless times. “I’ve thought about doing this before, but his year with way the economy is, I know people don’t have a whole lot of money and one thing that really hurts is the cold,” he says.
It was a seed sown many years ago when Sheridan was a child. A sixth grader like himself, a kid named Trevor Ferrell, came to his school to talk about how he went out one “code blue” night in Philadelphia to give a blanket to a homeless person and began a campaign that eventually became a multimillion dollar nonprofit. Along with food and warm clothing, Trevor’s Campaign provides transitional housing for the homeless in the city and through 19 affiliate chapters across the country.
If you’re from Philadelphia, you may remember Trevor’s Campaign and Trevor’s Place. Mike Sheridan never forgot it.
And he’s discovered, as Trevor Ferrell did, that some seeds that are sown, spread. Mike Sheridan’s Winter Warm Up has quickly gone “viral.”
“I posted it on Facebook and it started to spread by word of mouth,” he explains. “Some people said they’d put bins in their offices. We started out with bins at Brian McCollum’s Insurance Agency, Maggie O’Neill’s pub and Main Line Sound and Video. Friends are calling their friends. Everyone’s getting involved. One friend decided to put up a bin and sign at the Marple Recreation Center. Another put a bin in the Aston police station. The owner of Kid to Kid consignment shop donated five trash bags of kids jackets alone. I’m afraid I’m going to get overloaded, but that’s a good thing.”
Right now, he has about 75 coats, some stored in his garage, some at friends’ houses. He’s planning to distribute them by January 12, some to teacher friends who told him about the many kids who come to school coatless because their parents are too poor to afford them, others to an agency like Philadelphia Cares, a clearinghouse for volunteers all over the region. “We haven’t contacted them yet because we wanted to see how it went and I’m really glad to see how it’s taken off,” he says.
Mike Sheridan’s future is uncertain. He’s had two careers. A graduate of the Restaurant School, he’s worked as a pastry chef. He’s been a painter. But his injuries make it impossible for him to stand for long periods and he can’t lift anything over 30 pounds.
But if there’s one thing he does know, it’s what he’s going to be doing next year at this time. Collecting coats. “It’s a way to help,” he says. “You can’t put oil in everyone’s house, but you can give them a jacket. It’s a small thing, but it’s the small things that help out.”
Help Mike spread the warmth. Donate new and used coats for men, women, and children at any of these locations:
McCollum Insurance Agency in Manayunk
4109 Main Street
Philadelphia PA 19127
Maggie O’Neills Pub
1062 Pontiac Road
Drexel Hill, PA 19026
Main Line Sound and Video
503 West Lancaster Avenue
Wayne, PA 19087
Marple Newtown Recreation Center
20 Media Line Road
Newtown Square, PA 19073
Aston Township Police Department
5021 Pennell Road
Aston, PA 19014
If you need a pick-up, email Mike at sheridanswinterwarmup@yahoo.com.
