Snowball Express Needs You

Mother Of Fallen Marine Asking All Of St. Louis To Help
Snowball Express Needs You
Teresa Woodard
Reporter
9:46 p.m. CST, December 7, 2011

(KTVI-FOX2now.com)— Even if you have no vacation scheduled and no flight to catch Friday morning, a St. Louis area woman is hoping you show up at Lambert airport anyway. She`s extending a cordial invitation to a very special sendoff.

Julie Vinnedge has started making a living by warming hearts, even though her heart is broken.

"This Christmas is very difficult for us," she said, standing in the lobby of a St. Peters, Missouri, bank, smiling at a pile of toys. "But this makes me feel wonderful."


"If they can just get one or two gifts that they can call their own, it makes their day," she said of the kids who will be on the receiving end of the toys she and her adopted Marine family have taken in. Wednesday night she was collecting toys at the Enterprise Bank's Christmas Party.

There's a sad reason this Christmas will be difficult. "Phillip should be able to be home," she said. "Last year he was going to be deployed so we were prepared. But this Christmas he should be in my living room Christmas morning."

But he won't be. Phillip Vinnedge was a 19-year-old United States Marine Lance Corporal, killed in action in Afghanistan on October 13, 2010. He's the reason she's so involved in the Marine Corps' annual Toys for Tots toy drive, and the reason she's taken on another special project, and she needs all of St. Louis on board. It's called the Snowball Express, and it departs Lambert Friday.
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