When the booths went up at Relay for Life Saturday, most of Santa Clarita’s Relay community knew the drill.
Saturday marked the 28th Relay for Life of Santa Clarita, and this year, with one of its most ambitious fundraising targets yet — at $375,000 — its participants had the same essential goal: to live up to the valley’s impressive national fundraising ranking, which was 19th last year.
Team tents forming a circular walking path in a corner of Central Park were essential for what turned out to be a hot weekend for walkers, but Relay regulars came prepared.
The Cheesecake Factory team’s pink fairy costume came complete with a batch of pink parasols for walkers, tube-shaped fans made to lay over the neck and an ice box of cold bottled waters.
Kate Sawyer, team captain and longtime Cheesecake Factory employee — she began as a server with fellow team member Rachael Davis, and both now work at the company’s corporate office — was equipping walkers with gear to keep them cool, as well as signing up passers-by for their raffle.
If there’s one unbreakable rule of Relay for Life, it’s that one team member must be walking on the Relay for Life walking path for the duration of the event, in the spirit of the idea that cancer never rests.
Sawyer said that the emotions traditionally stirred each year during the Relay itself were especially close for team members: An executive kitchen member had just died on Tuesday.
“It’s still a little fresh, but it’s a very powerful event … you’re here to celebrate the people that have won, (and you) also remember the people that lost their battle,” Sawyer said. “So it’s a very emotionally full day. And if you’re here for the luminaria, you will probably end up crying, because it is just a kick in the throat.”
Davis said that losing a coworker about 20 years ago put the two of them on the path to being regular Relay for Life participants, and since then, the Cheesecake team has raised as much as about $10,000 in one year for cancer research.
The two of them have been through the wringer together, Davis said: The Relay for Life team was an outlet for action after the death of her dad a couple of years ago.
“My dad just passed from it out of the blue,” Davis said. “It changes the way you see things, and you want to go out there and help, and however, whatever you can do to try and make things better. So if this helps, then what we do this. (This) is why we do it every year.”
