By Michael Futch
The Fayetteville Observer
January 27, 2008
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=284101
SANFORD — Artist Ann Flaherty, facing fears of her own death three years ago, trusts her life to something more than blind chance.
She believes there's a reason she survived cancer treatment complications, and that there's a pattern to the way the world works that's not always easy to spot. She calls it synchronicity, the concept that certain things happen at certain times for a purpose.
She just has to look at how a need to fulfill a college art requirement grew into a new path in her life. Then that path prompted an inspired way of comforting her grandson that has mushroomed into a national program to help the children whose mothers or fathers are serving overseas in the military.
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| Artist and quilt-maker Ann Flaherty founded Operation Kid Comfort more than four years ago on Fort Bragg. Photo by Marc Hall |
The 51-year-old Flaherty is a quilter, and she's been known to spend months figuring out a design in her head before turning inspiration into a patchwork creation. She's looking to notch a reputation among art circles on the strength of her nontraditional quilts of many colors, designs and underlying social meanings.
"I can do the traditional quilts. I hate them. I'm bored," she said in that blunt northern way of hers. "I use fabric like a painter uses paint. A lot of my quilts are a response to something. I make fun of things in my work, too."
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| Ann Flaherty prepares to sew parts of a quilt recently at Fort Bragg . Photo by Marc Hall |
Flaherty has already earned national recognition for the Operation Kid Comfort quilt program that has spread to military installations at home and abroad.
She established the program more than four years ago on Fort Bragg. Since then, as many as a dozen U.S. military installations have copied the project, which creates and donates personalized quilts and pillows to the children of deployed military personnel.
To date, some 2,100 of the quilts have been given away on Fort Bragg alone.
"I realized this was something important," she said, "and that I had to follow through with it. It had to be pursued."
Operation Kid Comfort officially launched Oct. 25, 2003, on National Make-a-Difference Day, which was observed just before the International Quilt Market got under way that year in Houston. That's the major trade show held annually for the quilting industry.
At the time, Flaherty had the vision but lacked the know-how to make the planned program prosper. Once she pitched the idea to hundreds of manufacturers at the show, she received more than $16,000 in donations of thread, fabric, tools and batting.
"I realized I couldn't do this by myself. I knew it was going to be something big," she recalled during an interview in her home.
"That was our jump start. The whole program has been a model for generosity. The whole process has been like that. As we've needed it, it has been there. It's been a great lesson in resourcefulness."
Recognition has followed.
Flaherty has been interviewed on CNN's "American Morning" and, last fall, she was a guest on Dick Gordon's radio program "The Story" on WUNC in Chapel Hill that is syndicated nationally on National Public Radio.
Yet, Flaherty doesn't want to be defined solely by her involvement with Operation Kid Comfort.
"I want to get more into my art," she said. "I'm very proud of the program, but I'm also not the only one. A lot of people are involved in this. It's not a sole venture. I was fortunate to have a lot of people climb on the train with me."
A decade ago, Ann and Steve Flaherty relocated from Boston, the cradle of liberty, to the home of the brave in the Sandhills of North Carolina.
Though they maintain an apartment in Whitman, Mass., the state where they remain official residents, the Flahertys made the move for warmer weather and the chance to be closer to their children and grandchildren.
They make their home at Carolina Lakes, a gated subdivision established around a golf course that's located between Spring Lake and Sanford. Their house was one of the first built at Carolina Lakes.
She's no golfer. Rather than sink a putt, Flaherty prefers to sew.
"I don't bother him about his golf," she said.
"And I don't bother her about her quilts," said her husband.
Back in 2003, three close family members were deployed at the same time. Their daughter, Kathleen, was stationed at the demilitarized zone in South Korea with the 82nd Airborne Division. And son Mark was serving as a Marine engineer in Baghdad at the same time as their son-in-law, Michael Roman, an Army Apache helicopter pilot.
"It was crying time for us," Ann Flaherty said.
The conflict provided the backdrop for a good deed on the home front: Flaherty originated the idea of the "daddy blankies," as the Operation Kid Comfort quilts are sometimes called.
She had been making quilts since returning to school at Vermont College of Norwich University. Before graduating in 1997, she needed to complete an art requirement to fulfill her liberal arts degree.
Flaherty signed up for quilt-making.
"I got hooked," she said.
Perhaps that synchronicity thing she talks about led her from traditional quilt-making to designing quilt art and on to what she affectionately calls "my contribution."
As a younger woman, Ann wanted to go into fashion designing. Now, her mother has told her: "You're designing with a social message."
After the conflict in Iraq started, Flaherty's grandson Christian Roman was missing his father.
Chief Warrant Officer Michael Roman had been sent over to Iraq for the first time. The 18-month-old child didn't understand why his daddy wasn't coming home from work every day. He hoarded pictures of his dad, hiding them under his crib.
Flaherty designed a comforter for the boy, sewing the toddler his own patchwork quilt with pictures of his father and his family stitched into the fabric. The photos were reproduced through the technique of photo transfer, something she had been working with for her art quilts.
Flaherty later took the idea to the folks at Fort Bragg. She figured that if her grandson was having difficulty with the separation, other children were having similar problems.
She learned that the biggest fear for many soldiers deployed overseas is not that they might die, but that their children will forget them.
Lynne Grates, executive director of the Armed Services YMCA on Fort Bragg, loved the idea from the beginning. Now she oversees the quilt program.
"She's a visionary," Grates said. "She had gone to a couple of other places. I guess they didn't have the facility or time to spare to do it. The minute I heard it, I knew we could win a grant. It would complement the other programs at Fort Bragg. Now we've got the program up and running."
Currently, Tawnya Benn runs Operation Kid Comfort on Fort Bragg. This allows Flaherty to concentrate on the fundraising aspect of the program.
The handiwork is created on nine sewing machines inside the Armed Services YMCA on Jackson Street.
"We went from the corner of the storage room to taking over the room," said Flaherty. "The outpouring of volunteers has been outstanding."
Since the program was established, as many as 120 volunteers have helped to create quilts for children up to age 5. They make pillows for kids up to 12 years old.
Operation Kid Comfort does not receive money from Fort Bragg. Instead, it functions as an Armed Services YMCA program through donations and grants. Flaherty has invested her own money into the program.
Other local programs are at places such as Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, Fort Drum in New York, Fort Gordon in Augusta, Ga., San Diego Naval Base and overseas in Germany.
"I call our kids with Operation Kid Comfort 'America's littlest heroes.' And they are," Flaherty said. "They are so brave. Brave for themselves. Brave for their parents. And I don't think America realizes the sacrifice that military families and children of military families make. And it's all by accident. They're born into it."
Flaherty, the artist, creates her art quilts in a studio that's attached to the garage of her home. She can also fit a couple of grandchildren inside the room when they're sleeping over.
Some of her artwork hangs on the walls inside this little room that houses a sewing machine, spools of colored thread, bits and pieces of cloth, fabric dyes, paints, beads, tools, and baskets and plastic containers filled with cloth remnants.
"This is my palette," she said.
Inside the living room of her home, near the nifty computer desk that her husband built, a couple of quilts grace the walls.
Photography plays a key role in her work. Flaherty has developed a talent for making photo-transfer quilts.
One, which she titled "Liberty Still Endures," was designed six years ago from a photograph from Sept. 11, 2001. An anchoring image of the Statue of Liberty radiates a bold burst of upbeat colors through the stitched blocks of fabric. The idea is that Lady Liberty's torch shines on, and that this country has endured the darkness of those unnerving terrorist attacks.
"Prayers For Peace," the other quilt on the wall, is made to look like a scroll. It certainly isn't grandma's quilt. Cinnamon sticks have been inserted into the silk rovings and mounted on background fabric that, for Flaherty, is intended to symbolize universal prayers for peace.
After learning that her childhood priest, whom she loved, was involved in Boston's sexual abuse scandal, Flaherty worked out her anger in the quilt she titled, "'Tis Enough to Cause the Saints to Weep."
She's Irish-Catholic, and that work, which depicts hands breaking a Celtic cross, has been shown in a Sacred Threads show in Ohio.
Examples of her work have been shown as part of 14 or so exhibits over the last seven years.
Janine LeBlanc works as an assistant curator of costume and textiles at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh. Before moving to Raleigh from Fayetteville in 2000, LeBlanc and Flaherty were members of the same guild, Tar Heel Quilters.
"I've seen her work evolve over time to be much more sophisticated and gain depth," LeBlanc said. "I think Ann is more interested in community, in reaching the community, especially with Operation Kid Comfort."
She calls her friend determined, a woman with a good heart who doesn't let things stand in her way.
LeBlanc visited her in the hospital when Flaherty had initial surgery for colon cancer back in December 2005.
"She looked like she was on death's door, quite honestly," LeBlanc recalled.
At the same time, doctors found a lesion on her brain.
"It was not a good week," Flaherty said. "I was terrified. The 'Big C word.' That was a terrifying experience. I really thought I was going to lose it. To learn I had colon cancer and a lesion in the brain was a lot to take."
Fortunately, doctors caught the cancer early. But she did experience some complications during surgery that put her life in danger. "I was not supposed to make it," she said.
Flaherty has since undergone three more operations for colon cancer. It was not her first encounter with cancer: At the age of 30 in 1987, she overcame uterine cancer.
"She's been through illness after illness and just keeps going," said Grates of the Armed Services YMCA.
"She's had deaths in the family. She's been diagnosed with cancer. Through all this, she's a very strong woman."
Flaherty also deals with the auto-immune disorder, celiac disease, which attacks the lining of the intestine. She suspects that the brain lesion is related to this disease. Also, it probably attributed to the seizures that she was experiencing up to a year ago.
But today, she says: "I'm cancer-free, seizure-free, gluten-free. I got somebody watching out for me. I do. I know it."
"There's a line that I've used many times over and over again, but I mean it," she said. "The best way to support our troops is to take care of their families while they're overseas."
That, in a nutshell, defines the purpose of Flaherty's Operation Kid Comfort.
Looking back, she remembers being overwhelmed when trying to kick-start the program. On behalf of the Armed Services YMCA, Grates had agreed to operate the program with her. But Flaherty started feeling the pressure during a BMW Rally in Spartanburg, S.C., over Labor Day weekend.
She calls it an instance of synchronicity.
"I was in a panic mode the whole weekend," she said. " I just signed on to it. I said, 'Yes.' Now, 'How am I going to do it?'"
While waiting in line before making a leisurely mountain ride in her husband's BMW Z4 sports car, she and Steve started up a conversation with the couple in the car behind them. Come to find out, the woman — Kathleen Gruben — ran the marketing program at Georgia Southern University.
"I said, 'I need you,'" Flaherty recalled.
The following Wednesday, Flaherty was standing in front of her class. Gruben's two marketing classes took on Operation Kid Comfort as their class project for the semester.
"That's synchronicity," Flaherty said. "The powers that be put me right there with that woman when I was in a panic mode. There's your answer right there."
Staff writer Michael Futch can be reached at futchm@fayobserver.com or 486-3529.
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