For nearly a decade a retired farmer in Geraldine, Alabama, secretly donated money to a local pharmacy to help patients who could not afford medication.
Each month Hody Childress would give a folded $100 bill to pharmacy owner Brooke Walker and request that she never tell anyone where the money came from, according to The Washington Post.
He did that for the next 10 years until dying at 80 on New Year's Day.
"He said, 'Don't tell a soul where the money came from — if they ask, just tell them it's a blessing from the Lord,'" Walker told the Post.
Childress, a U.S. Air Force veteran, mostly lived on retirement savings and Social Security payments.
"Mr. Childress was a kind, humble man," Walker told WVM-TV. "Each and every month, year after year, he would walk into the drug store and hand me 100 dollars. I kept my word of not telling anyone, even the family. Eventually, I did start taking a little money here, a little money there, just to help people who were struggling."
Not even Childress' family knew, but he revealed his donations to his daughter just before his death.
"He told me he'd been carrying a $100 bill to the pharmacist in Geraldine on the first of each month," Tania Nix told the Post. "He just wanted to bless people with it."
After Childress' death and the revelation of his donations, members of the community reached out to his family.
"I heard from people who said they'd been going through a rough time and their prescriptions were paid for when they went to pick them up," Nix told the Post, recalling one woman who didn't have $600 for an EpiPen for her son.
"She wrote to me, saying she never knew who had helped her until my dad died," Nix explained. "She said it brought her tremendous relief as a mother, and she couldn't thank my dad enough."
Now community members hoping to keep Childress' legacy alive are making their own donations to the pharmacy.
"We're calling it the Hody Childress Fund, and we're going to keep it going as long as the community and Hody's family wants to keep it alive," Walker said.
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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