Before March of this year, when was the last time any of us had to concern ourselves with how and where we would be able to purchase a mask, aside from Halloween season? Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was usually easily obtainable for those in the medical field and surgical-style masks were available for bulk purchase through a number of retailers, both online and in person.

But once COVID-19 made its presence felt with a vengeance globally, these supplies, along with hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes and toilet paper, suddenly became scarce for not just the average civilian, but for medical professionals and others on the front lines of this growing struggle. With states across America scrambling to secure desperately-needed supplies, one Bath woman’s effort to rally volunteers to provide homemade cloth masks for these heroes has quickly morphed into an inspirational, wide-ranging effort that has provided over 17,000 cloth masks to folks in need across the Lehigh Valley.

Ruth Dennison, a retired oncology nurse who has worked in hospitals all over the Lehigh Valley, initiated the effort by simply asking for help through social media for her friends in health care who were suddenly facing a critical shortage of PPE.

“I felt dangerously apprehensive that my colleagues would be in harm’s way,” she said, which inspired her to create the Facebook page MaskForce2020 (which would later become more widely known as Masks for the Lehigh Valley) on March 21. The adjacent group known as the Mask Force Sewing Community, which acts as the central communication forum for her network of volunteer sewers. It was through her efforts, her daughter, Christine Dennison, and those who answered the call that a well-organized mass effort was established to truly make a difference to those tasked with the unexpected challenge of serving the community and treating those impacted by this highly contagious, deadly disease.

Christine helped to organize the voluteers whose numbers reached 1,000 in the first 48 hours and has since grown to over 2,000.

Joan Zachary, who is on the faculty of Northampton Community College’s Fabrication Laboratory (known colloquially as the Fab Lab), was among the first who quickly answered Dennison’s call. Acting as the group’s press liaison, she explained through an email interview April 18 that the Fab Lab offers classes in many activities, including sewing and how to use a laser cutter. The Fab Lab’s industrial sewing equipment and their laser cutter have been put into use to make masks and mask kits. The kits have been distributed throughout the Lehigh Valley, and a veritable army of volunteer sewers has been making masks from these kits since the last week of March, using a pattern that was developed by Monica Beaky and Sean Kernan, fellow Fab Lab faculty members.

It took about a week to tweak and perfect the pattern and for the sewing instructions to be written from when the Facebook group was established, she said. The Interim Director of the Fab Lab, Sean Brandle, said he, Kernan and Beaky ironed, cut fabric to length by hand, cut elastic by hand, laser cut the fabric, packaged and inserted instructions for all the kits in less than 47 hours.

Even though in the early stages of the effort the community was coming forward to donate fabric for the kits, the supply could not keep up with swiftly growing demand. Joann Fabric, the retailer Dennison was relying on to purchase more fabric and other related materials, had closed for regular business as of March 23. Although an anonymous donor was able to obtain $600 worth of elastic (enough for 25,000 masks, Dennison estimates) for the effort after Joann closed, it was immediately apparent that there wasn’t going to be nearly enough fabric on hand to sustain their efforts as the number of willing volunteers continued to grow.

Unsure how she was going to procure more materials for the effort, Dennison left an “urgent voicemail,” in her words, on Joann’s corporate 800 number. She was personally contacted the following day by Vice President of Business Development Stephen Caution. By March 27, 600 pounds of donated fabric arrived via a truck from California.

Dennison was happy to have the material that she needed, but now faced a new challenge.

“I had to figure out how to wash all of it!” she said.

Enter Hospital Central Services Corporation (HCSC) of Allentown, a healthcare linen services provider, which offered to donate its services washing the donated fabric. The truckload was delivered directly to their facility on 28th Street, where they laundered the fabric and even untangled it all by hand, Dennison said. HCSC delivered the cleaned fabric directly to the Fab Lab the very next day.

Valley churches and local women, in particular (and in some cases, whole families), have been critical to Dennison’s effort. With volunteers coming forward en masse and the effort growing exponentially just a few days after the establishment of her Facebook page, Dennison knew that she needed somewhere to store sewing machines and materials, as well as to act as a distribution hub for kits and finished masks.

At first, everybody was fearful of potentially spreading the virus, she said. “Nobody wanted to participate,” she said. Zachary specifically praised Dr. Jill Peters, a faculty member at Moravian Seminary.

“Her contacts with Lehigh Valley churches were invaluable in setting up a distribution system,” Zachary said, “so we could get kits to the sewers, and completed masks back to us so Ruth (Dennison) could take them to where they were needed.

On March 24, Dennison was granted access to Belfast Wesleyan United Methodist Church, followed the next day by Bethlehem’s First Presbyterian Church on Center Street. St. John’s UCC of Coopersburg eventually joined as well. She estimates that her effort has employed between 250 and 300 active sewers, with some women individually churning out over a thousand masks since the effort began.

The first completed masks reached recipients by the first week of April, and as of April 18 Zachary anticipated reaching 10,000 masks completed and distributed. As of May 1, that toal had reached 17,885 masks.

Recipients of the completed masks have been the folks working on the front lines at the COVID units at St. Luke’s and Lehigh Valley Hospital locations throughout the area, nursing homes such as Gracedale and Cedarbrook, various local first responder units such as EMS squads and fire departments, Lehigh County Prison, the ARC of Lehigh and Northampton Counties, KidsPeace and others. Zachary also wanted to recognize Jennifer Christman, who designed their website (www.maskforce2020.com), on which Zachary has kept a public blog detailing their efforts, and Aki Susko, who “worked with Jennifer to build some organizational systems so we could work more efficiently.”

Dennison has compared the mask-making effort to that of Bethlehem Steel’s manufacturing during World War II, when it operated as the nation’s top military contractor. She said she knows that the “women doing the sewing will be remembered in 40 or 50 years” in much the same way that the women from that era’s war production efforts are remembered in history books today.

She doesn’t seem to have any intention of slowing down any time soon, as long as volunteers are willing to keep sewing, although she said she has stopped checking her phone in the middle of the night due to the number of messages and notifications she receives. She also admitted that she would like to eventually take a month off to recharge once this crisis has subsided. Surely, all two thousand-plus members of the Mask Force Sewing Community can agree that it would be well-deserved.