Turkey RPCV Roseanne S. Allexenberg, the founder of Cayuga County's Christmas Elf program, died of ovarian cancer
Obituary: Cancer claims Christmas Elf founder Roseanne Allexenberg
By Amaris Elliott-Engel
The Auburn Citizen
Auburn, N.Y.
January 7, 2005
The woman who created one of the community's most beloved holiday charities died this week.
Roseanne S. Allexenberg, the founder of Cayuga County's Christmas Elf program, died Tuesday of ovarian cancer.
Allexenberg was a former correspondent at The Citizen, and often began her columns listing families who needed Christmas gifts for their children with the pronouncement "the Christmas Elf is smiling."
Allexenberg, 60, founded the Christmas Elf program in 1987 because she didn't want children to go without Christmas, said Rosemary S. Lumley, Allexenberg's mother.
"Christmas is just 30 days away," Allexenberg wrote in one column published Nov. 26, 1995. "Many families are still remembering the smells and sounds of joyous Thanksgiving Day. But, for many others, Thanksgiving ushered in a season of desperation for the working poor, those struggling to support themselves and family on minimum wage - often with one or more part-time jobs and no benefits."
But the Elf was just one of her many community projects.
"She was busy all the time. She liked to help people," Lumley said.
As a correspondent for The Citizen, Allexenberg wrote passionately about social justice issues. She wrote a three-part series on how families and school districts deal with children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, including a piece that profiled her brother, David J. Treat, who was diagnosed with ADHD. She also tackled pieces on funding cuts to the Peace Corps and the history of Columbus Day.
As a teenager, she was active in civil rights efforts, including being arrested in Alabama and spending 11 days in jail at the age of 18 while helping to register black voters.
At the age of 22, Allexenberg headed abroad as a volunteer with the newly formed Peace Corps. Meeting President John F. Kennedy influenced her, as it influenced many other young people in the 1960s.
Following her Peace Corps service, she worked as a Peace Corps recruiter in St. Louis for five years. Allexenberg then worked at the St. Louis Young Women's Christian Association as a fund-raiser and program planner and then as a public relations person for the St. Louis Health and Hospital systems until 1985.
Allexenberg earned her bachelor's degree from Alma (Mich.) College and two master's degrees from the University of St. Louis.
Ill health, however, interrupted Allexenberg's professional public service work.
Allexenberg's lympathic system was destroyed by a long-dormant parasite she had contracted while living in Turkey. She moved to the Auburn area to be closer to her family.
Allexenberg moved to Niagara Falls with her family in 1990, but she still worked as a correspondent with The Citizen on the Christmas Elf program through Christmas 2000.
In 2000, Allexenberg was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, but she volunteered with Literacy Volunteers of America despite her cancer, helping people from other countries improve their English language skills and tutoring children to improve their reading levels.
Allexenberg's ovarian cancer was in remission for 10 months until November 2004, when she got leukemia and fluid entered her heart. She died at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo.
Allexenberg was working on a book about the influence of returned Peace Corps volunteers in the United States.
Allexenberg's own influence as a RPCV was to develop community programs giving those in need a hand up, not a hand-out.
In Sept. 26, 1995, she wrote in The Citizen that this principle should inform American foreign aid in a world where global economic ties made isolation impossible: "... Support for development and humanitarian relief for the most impoverished should also be a vital part, even the primary part of the U.S. foreign aid mission. We must help people to help themselves. We must help people to learn to feed, cloth and house themselves ... Sustainable projects must help people, communities and nations become more self-reliant."
