ANAHEIM : School Blanketed With Appreciation

Ray Fico usually distributes blankets to homeless people living on Anaheim’s streets or in its shelters.

But recently he delivered 1,500 blankets to Canyon High School in return for the volunteer help he received from a group of its students.

Fico said the thanks was long overdue, since the students had helped him during the holiday season when he was in a pinch to send out 35,000 mailers. But it was only recently that he realized that the perfect thank-you would be what he gives best: blankets.

“They don’t have any survival blankets at the school whatsoever,” said Fico, 70, who began his nonprofit agency, Covering Wings, in 1986. That Christmas, he and his wife, Sarah, decided not to give each other presents but to buy blankets for the needy.

But last holiday season, the organization was in the blanket-giving business over its head when its year-end total neared 60,000 blankets--more than it had ever distributed throughout California. The group had sent thousands of blankets to victims of the San Francisco earthquake. So he called on the students of nearby Canyon High to help.

“I had a deadline to get out those mailers, and I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I was stymied.”

But about 40 students answered the call for volunteers to help stuff envelopes, address labels and sort ZIP code destinations for the thousands of pamphlets, which described the organization and asked for donations. They spent all day on a Saturday, and some returned on Monday after school to finish the job.

Jim Dokos, assistant principal at Canyon High School who is in charge of the school’s emergency preparedness, said the blankets the school received this month would be an asset to the school’s earthquake survival equipment.