No matter how many times Gary Wolfe shaves it all off, a full head of long hair and a Grizzly Adams beard, the effects are startling.
“I go to the gym while (it’s growing out) and people say they don’t recognize me,” he said. “Then I shave and they say, ‘You look 15 years younger.’ And then I’ll say, ‘So, you’re saying I looked 85?’”
All jokes aside, Wolfe gets shaved and shorn, 15 times and counting, for a far more important reason than trying to hang onto his youth.
He does it to honor his daughter Krista and the 3.5-year fight she put up against a brain cancer that eventually took her in 2007 when she was 11 years old.
Every year for the past 15, Wolfe steps onto a stage at a Winston-Salem version of the St. Baldrick’s fundraiser and lets a barber go bananas.
“Krista was so courageous … you wanted to do everything you can to help (her),” he said. “And then it’s not enough. You want to remember that and honor it.
“It’s her legacy.”
Auctioning hair
So that you know, St. Baldrick’s got its start in Manhattan in 1999 when 17 souls set a goal of raising $17,000 by shaving their heads at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration.
They wound up with some $104,000 and created a blueprint that bloomed into the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, which to date has raised more than $368 million to support childhood cancer research.
Winston-Salem’s version followed that same blueprint when, if memory serves, students in the physician assistant studies program at the Wake Forest School of Medicine created an event to honor two local girls battling cancer.
The event found a home at the old Finnigan’s Wake, a Trade Street bar and restaurant in downtown Winston-Salem, and took off.
The local community, including doctors, nurses and scads of regular folk, fully embraced St. Baldrick’s and turned it into an occasion worthy of closing Trade Street to traffic.
It was relocated during the COVID-19 pandemic to the Ardmore Barbershop, where its chairs are 6 feet apart, and then moved again to the coal pit outside the renovated R.J. Reynolds steam plant.
In all that time, scores of people have auctioned off their hair. Beards, too, if the price is right.
Some return every year with teams of supporters. Few are more dedicated than Gary Wolfe, who leads a team he calls Krista’s Crusaders.
“He’s probably one of the OGs,” said Philip “Opie” Kirby, a former owner of Finnigan’s who continues to serve as an emcee for St. Baldrick’s, including a stint at the Sept. 27 shaving. “We’ve raised $65,000 so far this year, and that’s put (Winston-Salem) at over $1 million since we started.”
Creating a legacy
Wolfe, who lives in Kernersville, has helped raise more than $86,000 over the years.
Like a lot of parents who’ve had to face the unfathomable by outliving a child, Wolfe threw himself into charitable endeavors to keep his little girl’s memory alive.
He’s done St. Baldrick’s, of course, and raised funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, too, after they arranged for Krista to visit Disney World.
The way Wolfe sees it, doing so is selfish because it allows him to talk about his daughter, a spunky kid who loved her dog, two cats, Girl Scouts, art, reading, and her friends.
“You don’t talk about kids when they’re gone,” he said. “You just don’t. There’s no new stuff to talk about.”
Telling people about Krista has been — and continues to be — cathartic. “People who never met her feel like they know her,” he said.
At 67, Wolfe is nearing retirement and embarking on a new chapter in life. He’ll miss his job and his coworkers, as many people do, but he plans to keep raising money by shaving his head and beard in front of a crowd of strangers.
“I’m getting old enough to where my head is probably going to stop growing anyway,” he said.
Until then, though, he’s more than happy wearing hats for warmth rather than style and accepting compliments about his youthful appearance.
To his way of thinking, it’s the least he can do to keep the conversation going about a young girl taken way too soon.
Scott Sexton has been a bemused observer of daily life — and occasional thorn in the side of elected officials — in Winston-Salem since 2005. [email protected]
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