PASADENA, Md. — When a crisis hits, sometimes it brings out the bad in people.
We've all heard of price gouging and people hoarding essentials. Well, this story is not that. This is a story of a local business that made us all feel good.
Nick Doetsch and his partner Rick Levin are the owners of Pasadena Boat Works.
About 10 years ago, Rick was doing some volunteer work at the cancer center at Johns Hopkins. He was talking to a young girl named Makenzie Stuck. He asked her what the worst part of having cancer was and she said wearing the mask. So Rick designed a mask that would be "fun" for kids.
"There are covers, peal and stick covers that go over the N95 respirator. They enhance it, they dress it up and they make fighting germs fun."
So they originally ordered about 20,000 of them and were selling and mostly giving them away to children hospitals and the like. Life happened for Rick and new projects came along and now he had 14,000 mask in storage.
In comes his partner Rick. With all that is going on with the pandemic, Nick suggested they donate them to the state. The Department of Health was glad to hear from them.
"So they were very happy we had, I mean not too many people are going to have obviously that many mask in storage."
They were so happy in fact they showed up the next morning.
Not only was it a great thing they had thousands of these masks available, they're ratted as N95 masks and that's critical for these times.
"For people to be able to go into their doctors a lot of times they are going to have to have a N95 level mask to be seen.
Unfortunately, Makenzie passed away but, her spirit is still very much alive.
"I think she would be ecstatic today if she knew her name sake is on a product that is helping people right now."
Rick tells me he's heard for Makenzie's family and they say they are happy and proud her name is on a project like this.
