By Seth Gonzales
The Texas Catholic
PALMER — With only 10 followers on a Facebook page she created for Mike’s Delivery, a Palmer-based trucking company, Dianna Glenn was pessimistic about the chances of even a modest response to a call for donations she made on Aug. 28.
By the end of the business day on Sept. 1, the company had filled four 18-wheelers with 95 pallets of donations intended for the citizens of Rockport, where Hurricane Harvey unleashed some of its most devastating effects.
“The response has been absolutely overwhelming,” Glenn said on Sept. 1, as one-by-one donors emptied their car trunks full of donations. “We can’t even wrap our heads around the amount of donations we probably still have coming in.”
Glenn’s father, Mike Minter, has owned Mike’s Delivery for more than 30 years and said he was moved by the television coverage he was seeing on Hurricane Harvey’s devastation. Minter asked his wife, Mary, and daughter Dianna to organize the effort but admitted he had no idea, just how large the response was going to be.
“This thing was 100 times bigger than what I thought it was going to be,” Minter said. “It was pretty overwhelming to tell you the truth. We had our own workers putting these things on pallets and volunteers from our church that came and helped organize everything in boxes. It was a big deal.”
Glenn and her family are parishioners at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Waxahachie. Minter and his wife attend the Foundation of Life Church in Ennis. But in the midst of one of the worst disasters to hit the Texas coast, religious affiliation didn’t matter to either.
“Watching the devastation, your heart goes out to the devastation that those people are facing,” Mary said. “Once it hit, it breaks your heart.”
At 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, Minter and his crew began the drive to a holding center in Alice, Texas, where donations were being collected for storm victims in Rockport.
Minter said he is keeping an eye on the flooded city of Beaumont and didn’t rule out the possibility of making another run.
“It’s just a great thing,” Minter said. “Bottom line is we’ve been in business for 31 years, God has blessed me enormously and I just wanted to help people in need.”
