Walking stick

When she was seven years old, the donor whittled this walking stick on a summer vacation to the Adirondack Mountains. Living in Niagara Falls, New York, in the midst of the Great Depression, she'd never been to the mountains before. In fact, she'd never been on vacation before since her family couldn't afford one. So it was an exceptional event when another family took the donor's family with them into the wilderness space of the Adirondacks, quite a change from their small house. Having grown up without toys, it was an unexpected honor to be entrusted with her father's penknife in order to whittle a smooth handle on the stick she'd selected. And the walking stick was so significant and symbolic that she kept it into her 80s.