Wish Book holiday campaign celebrates 40 years of helping our neighbors
When Mercury News readers opened their newspapers on Sunday, Dec. 4, 1983, they were greeted with something beyond the big news of the day — a special section called Holiday Wish Book.
Though it was designed like an upscale department store catalog, it didn’t showcase popular gifts like the new VCR or Ewok plush toy of the time. Instead, the inside pages were filled with touching stories about people in the valley who needed help and offered readers a way to make a difference.
“This Wish Book is an unusual thing for a newspaper to publish,” then-Publisher Tony Ridder wrote in an introductory letter, “but these times demand that we all do what we can to alleviate suffering and to encourage those who are working in the front lines on the problems of the helpless, the hungry, the lonely and forgotten.”
So much has changed in the valley over the past 40 years, but that suffering still lingers — and in some ways has become even more dire, as many struggle to recover economically from an unprecedented pandemic.
Like the valley, Wish Book has evolved and grown with the needs of the community. In its four decades, Mercury News readers have donated more than $12 million to the annual campaign, granting more than 840 wishes for agencies and individuals, and changing the lives of more than 4 million of our neighbors.
Bay Area News Group Publisher Sharon Ryan said Wish Book — and Share the Spirit, its companion effort in the East Bay Times — remind her every year that the Bay Area is a special place, where kindness, acceptance and giving always rise to the surface.
“This campaign is our way of giving back to the community by shining a light on its most vulnerable people — and showing how we all can help,” Ryan said. “Every year we rally the incredible storytelling talent of our journalists to bring together our communities, connecting the generosity of our compassionate, giving readers with their neighbors in need.”
The 41st edition of the Mercury News’ Holiday Wish Book returns to our print pages and online platforms today. Starting now and continuing through the end of the year, you’ll read stories about families that escaped violence in Mexico to settle in San Jose, children finding joy with animals at a Sunnyvale farm, how the Stanford Children’s Health Teen Van provides free medical care for young people, and so many more.
In a valley known for innovation, it would be great to say we came up with this idea. But we didn’t. Then-Executive Editor Bob Ingle conceded at the time that Mercury News leadership saw the Holiday Wish Book published in 1982 by another newspaper — the Miami Herald — and liked it so much they brought the concept to San Jose.
Before the Holiday Wish Book made its debut in 1983, the San Jose Mercury News contacted more than 300 nonprofit agencies in Santa Clara County to find out what their biggest needs and who their neediest clients were, then narrowed the list down to stories of 45 individuals or agencies.
The Ming Quong Children’s Center in Los Gatos — now known as Uplift Family Services — was among those featured in that first 16-page section. They hoped to raise $538 to purchase four basketballs, three footballs, four soccer balls, some baseball gloves and jump ropes. Other requests were equally humble but emotionally moving: a 38-year-old client of Loaves & Fishes Family Kitchen asked for $500 for a new set of dentures; a 73-year-old woman living at the Park View Nursing Center wished for a 19-inch color TV with a remote so she could watch the Los Angeles Olympics the following summer.
Nearly 1,100 people donated that first year, contributing more than $63,000 by mid-January — all earmarked for the wishes they selected on a mail-in “coupon.” The donations ranged from 25 cents to $1,010, with some people giving in memory of others or banding together in groups, like the fifth- and sixth-grade classes at Sakamoto Elementary School in South San Jose (a class that included student Joey Nedney — who would grow up to kick field goals for San Jose State and the San Francisco 49ers).
Over the next four decades, hundreds of Mercury News reporters, photographers and editors contributed to Wish Book. But one person who embodied Wish Book’s spirit probably more than anyone else was Holly Hayes.
Hayes came to the Mercury News in 1990 as an assistant features editor and began overseeing Wish Book in 1995, a role she held onto until she died at age 53 in April 2010, following a 10-month battle with a rare cancer. She distributed the last check for the 2009 Wish Book, which brought in a then-record $450,000, just a week before she died.
Donna Kato, a former Mercury News reporter and editor who worked with her, said Hayes had a compassion for the community that made her the perfect editor for Wish Book.
“She was relentless in pursuing the best writers at the paper to deliver those stories every year, and was meticulously organized so that the publication showed the diversity and demographics of Silicon Valley, even as it evolved and changed through the years,” Kato said. “Holly was the heart of Wish Book, and I hope her legacy with it endures another 40 years.”
It was during Hayes’ tenure that Wish Book underwent a major change. Instead of the stories appearing solely in a single section, the Wish Book stories launched Thanksgiving Day, and rolled out through Christmas Day. The format change in 2004 gave writers and photographers more room to tell stories — and readers a chance to appreciate each individually. Since 2015, Wish Book stories have been collected on a single website, wishbook.mercurynews.com, where readers can catch any they may have missed, or revisit a story from years past that moved them.
Stories like Alannah Clayton, a San Jose teenager living with muscular dystrophy. In a 2019 Wish Book story, her parents Jeff and Debbie Clayton asked for $55,000 to replace her aging hospital bed, where she spent nearly 70% of her time. Donations poured in from scores of readers, but then something amazing happened.
The Mercury News received a call from a couple who had read Alannah’s story and wondered how much of the $55,000 was still needed. The answer was about $20,000, and the couple — who asked to remain anonymous — said they would bridge that gap.
It was a miraculous end to that story, but miracles keep happening: In 2020 — as the COVID-19 pandemic raged on — Lata Krishnan, the CFO of Shah Capital Partners and founder of the American India Foundation, made a record-setting $100,000 donation to Wish Book that was split among seven organizations she selected.
Dee Dee Robillard — who serves as director for both Wish Book and Share the Spirit — said she is grateful for the continued generosity of donors, who number in the thousands every year now, and for the past three years have collectively contributed around $1 million each year. That’s been enough to grant the “wishes” of every organization in the Wish Book, as well as several others that weren’t featured in stories.
While Wish Book’s scale has grown, so has its impact — on both the people it helps and the people who donate.
“We always are inspired by the many groups doing good in our community. It gives us hope that our common humanity can overcome what sometimes seems like an unbridgeable gulf in the body politic,” said longtime Wish Book reader Bob Weeks, who lives in San Jose with his wife, Nancy. “Please keep up this essential work.”
With the community’s support, that’s another wish we can keep making come true every year.