Raymond Finerty is a 59-year-old retired carpenter who has a voice thick with his native Ireland and strong working man hands, and doesn’t remotely resemble somebody who is dying. He lives with his wife, Mary, and daughter, Sheila, in the tidiest brick house you have ever seen, in Maspeth, Queens, and it was quite a place to be Tuesday afternoon, when seven visitors rang the doorbell and presented him with balloons, T-shirts, hats and a cake decorated with a golf ball and a tee and lots of green.
The little house has had an acute shortage of good news of late, so here was a welcome respite on a chilly spring day.
As he sits in the stands overlooking Auto Club Speedway this weekend, longtime NASCAR fan Danny Mell knows it could be the last time he hears firsthand the roaring engines, smells the burning rubber and sees the checkered flag drop.
No matter.
Mell, a 57-year-old Fresno man who has terminal lung cancer, is as excited as a child on the night before Christmas about his trip to Fontana.
“I haven’t been to a race in so long, it’s, ‘ Yeah!’ ” Mell said Thursday with a fist pump and a huge smile.
BELLFONTE, CENTRE COUNTY – Friends and family of a Centre County woman gathered on to help a deliver a dream. Marty Fleck and several of her relatives will take off for New York City on Monday.
The big gathering in the afternoon in the Bellfonte home of a relative was set up to be a big send off from friends and relatives for a woman who is facing a terminal illness with a lot of spirit. Marty Fleck has battled breast cancer for the past seventeen years. While she has managed to beat the disease three times, in this round she has been diagnosed with a stage four form of the cancer. It’s expected to take her life in the not too distant future.
Fleck says she is terminally ill with breast cancer and has an estimated six months to live. Fleck says she is going to make the most of the days she has left. On this day, she was on the receiving end of a celebration organized by the Dream Foundation. That national group grants wishes for people who are terminally ill.
RANCHO MIRAGE — On her 104th birthday Wednesday, Josephine Turchi received one of her two wishes — to have her family together for a champagne birthday feast.
Surrounded by 104 red roses and party balloons, cameras snapped photos with her and three generations of family members, including a daughter and son, grandchildren and great-grandson, Caleb, almost 2 years old. About 30 friends and family gathered for the afternoon soiree in Rancho Mirage.
“I had no idea I would live so long,” she said, “or have a family so large.”
Kim Bowman-Billings, left, points Friday to a picture of a ship her father, right, Gerald Bowman, served on during the early 1950s at Hardee’s on North College Avenue in Fayetteville during a celebratory lunch honoring Bowman by the Dream Foundation and Hardee’s Stars for Heroes program. Bowman, who is suffering from advanced heart disease, and his daughter, Bowman’s primary caregiver, will be heading to Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant, S.C., on Thursday to visit the USS Laffey. Bowman served on the Laffey while deployed with the Navy during the Korean War.