VERO BEACH — Eleven waitresses from Mr. Manatee’s in Vero Beach braced themselves on Tuesday morning as six of the restaurant’s cooks poured buckets of ice cold water from the building’s roof onto the girls’ heads.
The exercise was not a creative way to beat the Tuesday morning heat, but an initiative to participate in and spread the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge” that has received nationwide attention through Facebook over the last few weeks.
“Everyone is doing it,” said Frank Koch, area supervisor of Chefs International and mastermind behind the Mr. Manatee’s ice bucket challenge. “We want to do it bigger than anyone else.”
Koch posed the challenge to the restaurant and then decided to take the challenge to the next level, involving a large chunk of the restaurant’s staff, using colored water, and taking the buckets to the roof.
Mr. Manatee’s will be donating $500 to the ALS Association’s Florida chapter in Tampa and has challenged Vero Beach restaurants Mulligans, Chili’s, and Hurricane Grill and Wings to step up to the plate with their own buckets of ice water.
As of Tuesday, the ALS Association reported it has received $22.9 million in donations since July 29, the approximate date that the “Strike Out ALS Ice Bucket Challenge” went viral.
During the same period last year, the non-profit organization reported $1.9 million in donations. In short, the ice bucket challenge is working.
According to a Time report, the challenge started small between friends in Sarasota, Fla. One person would record themselves naming a charity, then pouring ice water over his or her own head and challenging a few friends to do the same or cough up a donation to the named charity.
The chain continued on a small scale until friends of former Boston College baseball captain Pete Frates accepted the challenge and named the ALS Association as their chosen charity.
Frates was diagnosed with ALS two years ago and recently accepted the challenge himself at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the New York Yankee’s all star who succumbed to the neurodegenerative disease in 1941.
According to the ALS Association, as many as 30,000 Americans may currently be affected by ALS and the disease remains incurable. Life expectancy from the time a person is diagnosed with ALS is between two and five years.
“It’s been since 1939 since Lou Gehrig made his speech and the life expectancy is still the same as it was then,” said Charles Aird, a Mr. Manatee’s cook who came in on his morning off to participate in the challenge. “We’ve got to bring awareness to the cause and change all of that.”
“Every 90 minutes, someone in America dies from this disease,” Koch said. “I’m excited to see how this grows from single people doing it to getting local businesses involved.”
President and CEO of the ALS Association Barbara Newhouse released an official statement in regards to the onslaught of donations recently made to the organization.
“Our top priority right now is acknowledging all the gifts made by donors to The ALS Association,” Newhouse said. “We want to be the best stewards of this incredible influx of support. To do that, we need to be strategic in our decision making as to how the funds will be spent so that when people look back on this event in ten and twenty years, the Ice Bucket Challenge will be seen as a real game-changer for ALS,” she continued.
As of noon on Tuesday, managers at Chili’s and Hurricane Grill and Wings said they would be discussing how to handle the challenge set forth by Mr. Manatee’s with their respective general managers. A Mulligan’s manager could not be reached for comment.
