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THE REAL LIFE SANTA CLAUS

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - For 26 years, a man known only as Secret Santa has roamed the
streets every December quietly giving people money. He started with $5 and $10 bills. As
his fortune grew, so did the gifts. In recent years, Secret Santa has been handing out $100
bills, sometimes two or three at a time, to people in thrift stores, diners and parking lots. So
far, he's anonymously given out about $1.3 million. It's been a long-held holiday mystery:
Who is Secret Santa?

But now, weak from chemotherapy and armed with a desire to pass on his belief in random
kindness, Secret Santa has decided it's time to reveal his identity.
He is Larry Stewart, a 58-year-old businessman from the Kansas City suburb of Lee's
Summit, Mo., who made his millions in cable television and long-distance telephone service.

His holiday giving started in December 1979 when he was nursing his wounds at a drive-in
restaurant after getting fired. It was the second year in a row he had been fired the week
before Christmas.

"It was cold and this car hop didn't have on a very big jacket, and I thought to myself, `I think I
got it bad. She's out there in this cold making nickels and dimes,'" he said.
He gave her $20 and told her to keep the change.

"And suddenly I saw her lips begin to tremble and tears begin to flow down her cheeks. She
said, `Sir, you have no idea what this means to me.'"

Stewart went to the bank that day and took out $200, then drove around looking for people
who could use a lift. That was his "Christmas present to himself." He's hit the streets each
December since.

While Stewart has also given money to other community causes in Kansas City and his
hometown of Bruce, Miss., he offers the simple gifts of cash because it's something people
don't have to "beg for, get in line for, or apply for."

That was a feeling he came to know in the early '70s when he was living out of his yellow
Datsun 510. Hungry and tired, Stewart mustered the nerve to approach a woman at a church
and ask for help.

The woman told him the person who could help was gone for the day, and Stewart would have
to come back the next day.

"As I turned around, I knew I would never do that again," Stewart said.

Over the years, Stewart's giving as Secret Santa grew. He started a Web site. He allowed the
news media to tag along, mostly because he wanted to hear about the people who received
the money. Reporters had to agree to guard his identity and not name his company, which he
still does not want revealed.

His entourage grew over the years, and he began traveling with special elves. People like the
late Negro Leagues icon Buck O'Neil, who handed out hugs while Stewart doled out $100s.
NFL Hall of Famer Dick Butkus will join Stewart this year in Chicago when Stewart hands
out $100s in honor of O'Neil, the first African-American coach in the Major Leagues.

They'll give out $100,000 between Chicago and Kansas City. Four Secret Santas who Stewart
"trained" will hand out an additional $65,000.

Doctors told Stewart in April that he had cancer of the esophagus and it had spread to his
liver. He has been lucky, he says, to get into a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
in Houston. But the aggressive chemotherapy has stripped away his appetite and energy. He's
lost about 100 pounds, but has held onto his white hair.

The treatment costs more than $16,000 a month, not including the cost of traveling to
Houston every two weeks and staying there for five or six days. He now has two months off,
but returns to treatment in February.
His insurance company won't cover the cost of the treatment, which has left him concerned
about his finances and his family.

Now, his mission is bigger than handing out $100 bills. Stewart wants to speak to community
groups about his devotion to kindness and to inspire others to donate their time and money.

"That's what we're here for," Stewart says, "to help other people out."
*

More News is posted HERE, HERE and HERE

In The News

FIND OUR MISSING:

Has anyone ever heard of Caley Anthony, Baby Lisa Erwin, Laci Peterson, Jaycee Lee Dugard, Natalee Holloway,
Audrey Seiler, Dru Sjodin, and/or Elizabeth Smart?

Have you heard the names Jeanette Marie Lamb, James Dickey and/or Chassity Reed? Well, they have been missing
since 2002 along with Amanda Alexandra Jones, Janib Bennett and Sasha Davis. Jahessye Shockley, Zana Hollbrock,
Zakyyah Copeland-Taylor have all been missing since 2011.

While watching The View, Chris Cuomo and actress S. Epatha Merkerson were on talking about missing Black
children. Included on the panel was a policewoman.
(At first, I was a tad disappointed that Joy Behar, Barbara Walters and the dingy girl were excused from the segment
but I suppose it made sense.)

Anyway, Whoopi asked Chris Cuomo why White people received more attention than Blacks and he stated the
following: “Some of the media plays into attention span and attractability ...what they believe will motivate their audience,
and a lot of the times, the judgments are wrong.” He went on to say, “We focus on people –you say that they are white –
and they are and there could be several reasons for that. Sometimes, they’re atrocious. There are more white people than
anyone else in the Country so you’re gonna have a higher collection. Sometimes its how incredible the story is, but often its
because they look good uh to the media who wanna put them on. You know, it sounds sinister, and it doesn’t need to be
until it becomes exclusionary of other people. And that’s when it's troubling.”

What is troubling to me, is that the policewoman agreed with Cuomo. She said that the police don't put much
emphasis on missing Black children.

One Mother on the show said that her 7-year-old daughter, Alexis has been missing since 2002. She said that the
child’s stepfather walked her to the school, which is just right across the street from her house. After little Alexis
didn’t come home from school that afternoon, the Mother called the school and was told that little Alexis hadn’t made
it to school that day. (I can only wonder why the school didn’t call regarding the child’s absence. In addition, I
thought the AMBER Alert System was in place in 2002, but someone on the panel said it was not.???)

When Alexis’ Mother called the police to report her 7-year-old daughter missing, it took them over an hour to arrive
at her home. After talking to the Mother, the police treated the missing child as a runaway. They said she may be
over at a friend’s house and that they would give it the weekend until she returned. If she had not returned by
Monday, they would file a report. The Mother tried to get media attention for her daughter but I don’t think she
received much. I suppose it was her local media but not nationwide, either way, I certainly do not recall hearing about
it.

Another missing child is Yasmin Acree who was just 15 years old when she went missing January 15, 2008. She was
an honor student who went missing in the middle of the night. That morning, Tuesday, January 15, 2008, her mother
dropped her off at school. Normally, Yasmin went to the YMCA on Tuesday afternoons. The Mother worked the
night shift so she had no idea her daughter was missing, so the next morning when she arrived at home she was only
told that someone broke into her home. She said she didn’t call the police at the time because she didn’t think it had
anything to do with her daughter. At about 5PM, the Mother began looking for her daughter but couldn’t find her
anywhere in the house so she called the police but they never came. The Mother said she had to call the police 3
times before they came out. The police asked what school she attended and because there was some sort of sports
game going on at the school, the police said she must be at the game. However, the Mother said no because she didn’t
give her daughter permission to go to any games. The Mother kept a close eye on her daughter at all times and the
daughter would have to ask before going anywhere. The police went by the school and then asked the Mother if the
daughter had returned, of course she had not. The police called a few times but didn’t file a report until the next day.
The Mother told the police about the break-in but they didn’t investigate any part of it. The following day – the
THIRD DAY - at a press conference, the police department had flyers printed that said ‘believed to be a runaway.’

Chris Cuomo said that it’s not unusual and said, “Very often in these cases we see in Black communities is that the
dynamics shifts from these people being victims to maybe they did something wrong. Maybe this kid ran away because it's
not a great situation or because it just happens. You even see it in the statistics…when they break down who runs away, the
number of Black kids who are found to be missing are right up there with white kids. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of Black
kids. …They combine white and Hispanics into one number. And it seems to suggest a preference and that’s what makes
this scary.”
Elizabeth Smart went missing in 2002; the media took over the airwaves for over 9 months until she was found.

Yasmin’s Mother said they couldn’t get much media attention about her missing child because the police had listed
her as a runaway. However, when the Mother complained that the police botched the investigation into her missing
daughter, then the media responded as they were only interested in a story of police misconduct.

S. Epatha Merkerson hosts “Find Our Missing” on TV1. I’ve been watching since its debut. (Channel 328 for Directv
subscribers.) I seen the one with Yasmin’s Mother and I REALLY think the boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend) killed her.
The stories are just as sad and/or interesting as other missing children, and more importantly, they are TRULY just as
heartbreaking. There was another one on there about a little disabled boy who went missing after he was left outside
alone. I REALLY think his “soon to be stepfather killed him.