St. Baldrick’s Day in Windsor raises funds for cancer research

Nikita Stewart of Santa Rosa gave up her dark brown locks Saturday for a cause close to her heart.

Stewart, a mother of two who works as a security guard, was the second person to mount a barber’s chair set up in the patio of a Windsor restaurant to raise money for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a charity that supports childhood cancer research.

“I’m so nervous,” she said, just before the electric razor began reducing her hair to stubble.

Stewart said she heard about Windsor’s fourth annual St. Baldrick’s event Friday on the radio and raised $110 from friends and a supportive crowd at Kin restaurant on the Town Green.

Her older daughter, Casey, now 29, was bald for four years while she battled leukemia in her early childhood. She has been in remission ever since, Stewart said.

“I can’t believe I did it,” Stewart told her friend Don Howard when the shearing was completed. “It feels very weird.”

One benefit, she said, will be the money she saves on shampoo she won’t be needing for a while.

Matthew Joffe, organizer of the Windsor event, said that 11 men and two women had registered in advance for the hair-loss session, scheduled to run until 10 p.m. More folks are likely to spontaneously join in the evening “after people have had a few drinks,” Joffe said.

His website had logged $12,700 in donations Saturday afternoon, closing in on the $15,000 goal and bringing the event’s four-year total to more than $50,000.

The charity began at a reinsurance industry St. Patrick’s Day party at a Manhattan pub on March 17, 2000, and the national foundation says it has donated more than $154 million to childhood cancer causes since 2005.

Bill Smart of Healdsburg, who followed Stewart into the chair, said he had raised $1,000.

“I felt compelled to do something,” Smart said, noting that his father died of cancer and a cousin, a friend and a co-worker’s wife are suffering from cancer. “It’s all around us,” he said.

His daughter, Genevieve, 2, seemed to approve, happily rubbing her dad’s freshly shorn skull.

For more information, visit www.stbaldricks.org/events/windsor.