YELL NEWSPAPER SALES GENERATE MORE THAN $13,000 FOR LITERACY, NIE PROGRAMS

For those who didn't immediately see the students in front of Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Jackson selling YELL papers Tuesday morning, the eighth-graders made sure the motorists heard them.

"Buy a paper," they shouted to those driving by. The students jumped, waved and otherwise called attention to their efforts to sell the annual newspaper edition that raises money for literacy.

At street corners in Cape Girardeau, Jackson, Gordonville, Fruitland, Scott City and Chaffee, volunteers wearing white aprons hawked copies of the paper with a masthead the spelled out YELL in bold yellow letters.

The sale of papers is the largest annual fund raiser for the YELL (Youth Education Literacy Learning) Foundation, which uses the money to award grants to literacy programs in Cape Girardeau County and Scott City.

This year the effort raised $13,411.29 in street sales plus $23,341 in sponsorship of ads in the YELL edition. The money will be awarded through grants to be announced in late October. Grant applications are available at the United Way.

Those selling the papers were volunteers from service and civic clubs, professional organizations, businesses, schools and public service agencies.

Some sellers took a subdued approach: standing in one spot while holding up a copy of the paper and only approaching cars when signaled. Others were pushing their papers at drivers waiting for stoplights to change.

At the corner of Kingshighway and Independence, Kim Hurt held a paper above her head and did a little dance to catch the eyes of morning commuters. That was the Schnuck's corner, and Hurt is a sacker at the grocery store.

Hurt and other store employees wore red T-shirts emblazoned with YELL in large white letters. "We go all out for this," said Dennis Marchi, Schnuck's store manager and a member of the YELL Foundation board.

Selling papers on street corners is not without danger. Ken Detring and Steve Horst, selling for the Rotary Club of Jackson at the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Hope Street, said avoiding getting run over was a major concern at that busy intersection.

But they felt it was worth it for the cause of literacy.

Both men, like many others selling the YELL edition Tuesday morning, were on the street by 6 a.m. Then, after several hours of hawking papers, they had jobs to get to. Detring is an optometrist and Horst a pharmacist.

Karen Green, president of the board of the YELL Foundation, was at a tent set up in front of Mercantile Bank where volunteers brought the money raised and, or leftover papers.

"We were very pleased with the sale," Green said Tuesday afternoon after the totals were in. The amount didn't match the money raised in 1998, but that edition featured a special section on St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire and his 72 home runs.

"We didn't have Mark McGwire this year," Green said. "But our numbers were still good."

John Harding, a member of Cape West Rotary, said his organization had no problem selling all of the 375 papers it took to the corner of Cape Rock Drive and Perryville Road.

"It was pretty easy," Harding said. "A lot of people know what YELL is now, and they want to buy it."