Cynthia Briggeman collects backpacks for kids.

 BACKPACK FOR KIDS: Cynthia Briggeman with her two children Addison (R), 1, and Alexis (L), 3. Through her non-profit, Briggeman has distributed 7800 back packs to children of military famiies over the last 3 years.(Photo by Paul Rodriguez, Orange County Register)

By VIK JOLLY

The Orange County Register

NEWPORT BEACH Her colicky infant’s irritability and pained cries disrupted Cynthia Briggeman’s sleep for nights on end.

She paced up and down the hallways of her home, cradling Alexis against her body. She tried to rock the baby to sleep. And, from time to time, she did what any mother would do: She turned to her husband for relief.

Briggeman counted her blessings, including having a husband by her side. Then she went a step further.

Her deep patriotism and respect for the military, which stretched back to her childhood, sparked an idea.

She turned her trying nights into something good for military families. Between sleepless stints emerged a vision to bring hope and reassurance to these families, many of whom have one parent stationed abroad, leaving the other to care for young children alone.

“There was a part of me that felt guilty,” Briggeman says, “that there are people who don’t have a spouse to help them.”

Briggeman resolved to provide backpacks filled with school supplies to military children as a way to help them excel in school.

The gift would also be a gesture of support for the parent left behind when their spouse answered the nation’s call to duty.

The result: Her mission has reached three military sites and touched some 7,800 children and counting.

It wasn’t a lack of worldly support that spurred Briggeman to action. She had all the comforts affluence brings in Orange County – a home in a gated community, a Mercedes Benz, a finely combed sand tot lot near a harbor with yachts docked in slips.

“Regardless of where you are in life you should give back, whether it’s buying soup for (a homeless person) on the road or helping the kids with a backpack or donating to a cancer foundation,” Briggeman says. “I just felt that I was ready at the time to do this.”

MEMORY LOSS

To see why a wealthy 33-year-old Orange County housewife whose material needs were fully satisfied would decide during sleepless nights to help others, one has to reach back into Briggeman’s past.

As a little girl growing up in Arcadia in a single-parent household, Briggeman learned to appreciate the rigors of handling a family alone.

Her father and mother divorced when Briggeman was 3. She remembers the void she felt during a father-daughter ice cream social in elementary school.

Her grandfather, Ed Justice Sr., a former U.S. Air Force pilot who ferried battered planes between France and England during World War II, talked about American presidents and took her to see July 4 fireworks, instilling in Briggeman a love for the flag and country.

A great aunt, Marie Hamby, helped shape her Christian faith, reminding Briggeman to remember God’s blessings and to give to others.

Briggeman studied philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. One day she was putting an angel on a Christmas tree in her apartment when her cat knocked over the stool she was standing on. She hit her head against the ceiling fan and was knocked out cold.

The accident resulted in amnesia, which landed Briggeman in therapy for two years and caused her to miss out on a bachelor’s degree just six units shy of graduation. Instead, she found herself fighting to remember whether she had turned the oven on or if she had poured herself a glass of orange juice.

A NEW DIRECTION

“When you have to work hard to get those basic things back, you start to look at things differently,” Briggeman says.

She opted to forgo further therapy. She decided she wanted to affect the lives of other people instead of feeling sorry for herself.

“It was unintended, but it was a smack on the head, like ‘You have some gifts. I’ve given you gifts in your life, when are you going to recognize those gifts,’ ” she recalls thinking.

Between her sleep-deprived nights with a colicky child, Briggeman had visited the Web site of Toys for Tots, a Marine Corps Reserve program, to see if she could donate toys. She found that some children had asked for backpacks.

She decided this was a need she would fill for military families. She never wavered in her belief that the backpacks would get to the children, that people would donate and everything would work out.

That’s because, Briggeman says, she knew she had the gift of a strong ability to influence people.

When she was a kid, her friends told her she could sell ice to an Eskimo. As a sales manager for a winery, she got the nickname “Money” from her boss.

But it took more than a sales pitch to get backpacks for military kids; it took shoe leather and hustle. It took wading through the military bureaucracy.

“I am sure there’s a measure of trepidation because we’re a large organization,” said Col. Chris Philbrick, garrison commander at Fort Irwin, an Army training center near Barstow. “The military is somewhat daunting to some. She was dogged in her determination to see it accomplished.”

REAL O.C. HOUSEWIVES

Once Briggeman’s idea gelled, her husband suggested forming a nonprofit organization and hired an attorney to help.
She called on a few of her best friends to help. Her mother, Janis Waite, became the secretary of the group. The women responded and knocked on doors seeking donations.

Money poured in. The organization the women named Pack for the Future raised $22,000 in 2005, its first year.

“At that point we knew that this was going to work, because we struck a chord with people on a couple of different levels,” Briggeman says.

Most people know school supplies are essential, she says, and in the group they found a tangible and affordable way to thank the military.

At $10 each, the red backpacks – filled with basic school supplies and a red, white or blue teddy bear with two stars sewn above its heart – started reaching children.

That year the group handed out 2,200 backpacks at Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base. In 2006, 2,500 went to children at Camp Pendleton, and another 2,500 were distributed last year at Fort Irwin.

This year’s goal: 3,000 backpacks for the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar.

GRATEFUL CHILDREN

“Thank you for my supplies. … My dad is a Sgt. now because he went to Iraq and came back alive,” wrote a third-grader.

Handwritten notes like these, with drawings, started filling up Briggeman’s mailbox at the post office.

She read them and her eyes brimmed with tears. A woman who worked at the post office noticed, and Briggeman shared the notes with her. The woman also wept.

“You open it up and you just think, ‘If my child was drawing a picture, she wouldn’t put a Black Hawk helicopter in her picture, but that’s their reality,’” Briggeman says, as she thumbs through a stack of colorful notes.

The notes are one barometer of the effect the backpacks have had. Donations dwindled last year as public support for the Iraq war waned. But for Briggeman, support for the military is not just a wartime passion.

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To reach Pack For the Future, call 949-429-1902 or write to PO Box 15457, Newport Beach, CA 92659. E-mail: Packforthefuture@aol.com.

On the net: www.packforthefuture.org.

The group’s next fundraiser is on Jan. 26 from 4-6 p.m. at French 75 in Laguna Beach.

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Contact the writer: 949-465-5424 or vjolly@ocregister.com

Posted in: Military affairs • People in the news |

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