One Carterville man has had the want to help others nearly his whole life according to his wife, Lou Flora.

“He always told me, when he was a young boy, they lived down in Tunnel Hill, they had absolutely nothing. They even didn’t have power,” Lou Flora said.

John Flora then explained why growing up poor made him want to give to back to others.

Advertisement

“One Christmas Eve, we didn’t have any Christmas. And there was a knock on the door and it was the Rotary Club, or one of the clubs down there, they brought us a big box of food, and a big box of toys,” John Flora said. “And I thought at that time, if I get to the point where I can help people, I’m going to.”

Flora moved to Carterville when he attended SIU, but decided SIU was not for him and later began working as a mailman in Carterville where he worked for 34 years and then retired.

Saturday was Create a Smile thrift store’s grand-opening. Flora said they are finally back on their feet and are ready for people to come check out the store, which sells more than just clothing. They sell nearly everything; electronics, knick-knacks, furniture and more. He said they were closed for five months and being closed that long makes people forget to go there.

Flora started Create a Smile Dental Foundation in 2003, which helps those in need pay for dental work.

“We figured if the Salvation Army and other organizations can have a thrift store, we can too,” Flora said.

Create a Smile Thrift Store in Carterville is where most of the money for the foundation comes from, though they do hold fundraisers too, such as chicken leg eating contests, walkathons and bucket brigades.

Create a Smile Thrift Store has helped many people in the area get the dental care they need.

Advertisement*

“He’s helped children, he’s helped veterans, he’s helped elderly, and it hasn’t been just from Carterville,” said Lou Flora.

Flora said he personally knows how costly dental work can be, when his son needed expensive dental work done, he said he had to sell his boat to pay for it.

“You know a lot of people don’t have a boat to sell,” Flora said.

Flora said he looked around online to see if he could find any foundations that help pay for dental care and had trouble finding one, so he decided he would start one.

“I wanted to do something a little bit different,” Flora said. “So I started thinking on the mail route, what I was going to do.”

He knew retirement was coming up and decided he should spend his time of retirement helping others, but this is not the first time he has helped others. Flora is an active member of the Lion’s Club and used to help out with the boy scouts among other things.

Create a Smile Thrift Store was first opened in Zeigler, but they moved the store to Carterville around 2007.

Flora said they have an online application process for people that need help paying for dental work, and then they have their board interview with the applicants in order to decide who can receive their funds. He said they currently have a list of around 150 applications and cannot currently serve many of those people right now, because they are just getting over paying for damages that happened to their store after a fire occurred in the store next door to theirs.

Flora said the store next door caught fire in February of this year and their thrift store suffered from smoke and water damage.

“It’s a wonder our building didn’t burn up too,” Flora said. “It’s so close, if the wind had been coming from the north, I believe it would have taken it.”

They had to recycle everything they had in the store because it all smelled of smoke. Flora said this is not the first time this has happened.

In 2010, the thrift store itself caught on fire. Though the insurance paid for many of the costs involved, it did not cover everything, but despite these two fires, Flora is determined to keep creating smiles.

“Since we are not for profit and donation only, everything you see in here has been donated. So if it weren’t for the goodness of people that know us and believe in us and support us, bringing this clothing in… we would not have been able to reopen our doors,” Deborah Robinson said, an employee at the store.

Money earned from Create a Smile Thrift Store pays the bills to keep the thrift store open and pay the three part time employees the thrift store has, but everything after that goes to the foundation.

Create a Smile Thrift Store helps more than just their foundation, but others too. Flora said they have several volunteer workers, and many of those come from Project CHOICES or the boy scouts, and other organizations looking to get job experience and do community service.

Among the donations, John Flora is about to start selling his toys again. Flora used to make handmade wooden toys like cars and trains in his spare time, and decided the toys would be a good thing for the store to sell. He said his prices used to range from around $3 to $25, but he may start charging as much as $40 for his larger trains and toys of that caliber because of how much time they take to make, and those funds will also help the foundation.