Marlinton Woman’s Club hosting cancer awareness, prom shop events

The Marlinton Woman’s Club is staying busy with several events for Pocahontas County community members.

Most recently, the Woman’s Club hosted a New Year’s Eve gala at the Pocahontas County Opera House. On Thursday, the club is sponsoring a speaker about cancer awareness at 7 p.m. at Marlinton’s McClintic Library. In February and March, the club will be giving away prom dresses to young ladies in middle school and high school.

Laura Dean Bennett said the club’s motto is “living the volunteer spirit”. Founded in 1917, the club currently has about 28 members from all over the county.

“We are very proud to be one of the foremost civic organizations in the county, and we take our responsibility seriously. We work very hard. We sell kettle corn. I’m sure everyone has seen us out there peddling our kettle corn the last few years and through the sale of our kettle corn, we have been able to pass along an awful lot of money into the community, and we’re very proud of that hard work that we do,” Bennett said.

On Thursday, Donna Lidel-Burley, a nurse practitioner with the Pocahontas Memorial Hospital will present a free information session to help you stay healthy and to raise your cancer awareness.
Lidel-Burley previously worked at Cabell Huntington Hospitals and the James Cancer Care Center at Ohio state. As a breast cancer survivor herself, she is well aware of the need for everyone to be informed.

“I’m hoping that the cold, cold weather won’t keep attendance down … It’s something that we’re all affected by, and we need to know more about,” Bennett said.

The Woman’s Club New Year’s Eve Party was a successful event that Bennett said will hopefully become an annual gala.

“It’s planned as a community get together, not so much a fundraiser. It’s something that we like to do for the community to help keep Marlinton vibrant and to help keep Marlinton as the center of activities for the whole county. And when we looked around and saw there’s not really that many things going on for New Year’s of this quality, we’d like to do something like that every year.

“We had, I would say, about fifty people in attendance. It was a lovely evening. We had a lot of fun. We had a DJ. Everyone danced. We had hors d’oeuvres all night, and we had a big supper at midnight, and it was quite a lovely event,” she said.

The Woman’s Club currently has hundreds of prom dresses donated by a woman in Texas. The club has yet to set dates yet, but hopes to distribute all of the dresses to young ladies in the county.

“There’s a fairy godmother, she calls herself, a lady in Texas, who’s been quite good. Her organization gathers up prom dresses from all over, and then ships them out to organizations like ours, who want to make sure that they get into the hands of young ladies who need them. She did that last year and she’s done it again this year. This year we got even more dresses,” she said.

“They’re beautiful dresses. We have hundreds of them in all sizes. We’re doing the prom shop again. We’re going to have a date in February yet to be determined for the high school. We’ll have a date up at Green Bank and at Marlinton Middle School in March, both of those, and we urge anyone who has a daughter or grand-daughter who may be interested in coming and getting one of our dresses for free to please watch for the notices and to come out and try some dresses on because we would like to outfit every young lady who wants to go to prom with a beautiful dress,” Bennett said.

For more information about all of the charitable giving and events planned by the Marlinton Woman’s Club, visit marlintonwomansclub.org.