Petaluma family donates more than 13,000 masks, winning North Bay Spirit Award

Lynn Calza and her two teenage children never set out to become pandemic heroes. They just wanted to make a few cloth face masks for family and friends.

But one mask led to another, and to date they have sewed and distributed more than 13,000, giving them all away for free to anyone who needed them: friends, family, medical workers, entire fire departments, grocery store checkers and complete strangers.

For their efforts to provide this simple means of protection from the virus to hundreds of people, Calza and her teens have been selected as January’s North Bay Spirit Award winner. A joint project of The Press Democrat and Comcast, the award honors people who have made a major contribution to the betterment of the community. Through creativity, ingenuity and determination, they have identified a need and found a way to fill it.

(See a video about their work here.)

World upended

Back in late February 2020, the Petaluma single mom and her teens, both students at Casa Grande High School, were looking forward to the school’s upcoming spring break and a beach house vacation rental in Fort Bragg. But in the weeks before their trip, all three fell ill.

“It was the worst sickness my girls or I had ever experienced,” Calza said. “Two solid weeks of fever that nothing would cut, and we also had pneumonia. I don’t follow the news, so I hadn’t heard anything about coronavirus at the time, but looking back I really think that’s what we had.”

Calza considered canceling the beach house rental, but all three recovered as the mid-March departure neared, so they took off.

“By the time we reached the beach house, the pandemic and sheltering in place had hit the news,” Calza said. “We were getting all kinds of Nixle alerts, and various bits of information about the pandemic was coming in from all over the place. It was a shock, really, and confusing. Nobody really knew what was happening. By the time I got to the grocery store in Fort Bragg, the shelves were completely empty. It was the worst vacation ever.”

Returning home a few days later, Calza and her children traveled through a completely different world than the one they left.

“Driving back was surreal,” Calza said. “There were no cars on the freeway. Big shopping centers we passed had maybe two cars in the parking lot. Back home, life was at a standstill. We’d been really sick, so both girls had missed two full weeks of school. Then we went on spring break, came home to lockdown and that was that. They never went back to school and we were shut up in the house.”

That’s when Calza's 17-year-old daughter, Leilani Pickett, decided to sew a couple of masks.

“I was so bored, because I couldn’t really do much,” Leilani said. “So I spent a lot of my time playing video games or scrolling through the internet, and I think it was on Snapchat that I came across an article about the shortage of masks. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s not good.’ ”

In March 2020 masks weren’t yet officially mandated for entering public locations such as grocery stores, but many health officials were advising the public to wear them. Overnight, it seemed, articles illustrating how to make simple cloth masks started to appear, and free mask-sewing patterns were widely available as an online download or a newspaper cutout.

Leilani decided it was smart to make masks for her family because it was nearly impossible to find them for sale. Her grandmother had taught her a few sewing basics, and she plunged into the task with the family’s old sewing machine. Soon she and her mom wore their new masks while shopping at the local Safeway.

“Oh, I love your mask,” the cashier told Leilani when they were checking out. “I want one just like it.”

“So my mom volunteered me,” Leilani said, laughing. “She told the cashier I’d make one for her. But I didn’t mind, because I really wanted to help people. That was the first time we donated a mask.”

Calza believes that the illness she and the teens had recently experienced left them with them a strong desire to help protect people from COVID-19.

“My dad was a doctor, my mom a nurse,” Calza said. “I know how disease is spread. I knew a mask would protect me and others, that wearing a mask was the only way to shut this down. Giving masks away was something we could do to help make that happen.”

A deluge of requests

To get started, Calza and Leilani chose to make a form-fitting mask with elastic ear bands, and to construct masks in three sizes (adults, teens and children).

They also were determined to give the masks away for free, a generous decision considering that, like most middle-class families, they live on a budget (Calza runs a small internet store, Nila Collectibles, that sells unusual vintage items with a focus on military surplus).

“Many people have told her she should charge for the masks,” said Calza’s mother, Judy Calza. “But once she makes up her mind about something, that’s it. She has stuck to it. I’m so proud of them, how selfless Lynn and the girls have been — all that energy and time.”

Calza was motivated to keep the masks free because of the steep prices she saw online for cloth masks. She knew that, for some people, spending $15 or $25 for a mask meant putting less food on the table. When Leilani, a math whiz, calculated the cost of the masks they were producing, the result was 50 cents apiece.

Once they figured out the project’s basics, Lynn announced the free masks to Facebook friends. In the North Bay and on Facebook the word spread quickly, and the family was deluged with more mask requests than Leilani could handle, so Calza and her younger child, Nila Pickett, 14, joined the endeavor.

Nila sewed masks at first but later shifted to processing and distributing them. Nila’s tasks included flipping sewed masks inside out, organizing orders and printing labels.

Calza — who hadn't used a sewing machine in about 40 years — resurrected an old machine of her grandmother’s. “I really needed Leilani's help at first,” she said, “because I was very rusty.”

She also organized and ran the operation. She kept track of each day’s mask output and entered mask orders on a spreadsheet. She packed masks into bags and stapled a message to the outside that offered advice for staying safe and healthy. It was signed “With love, Lynn Calza & family, and a whole slew of teammates making this all possible!”

The teammates she refers to are the many volunteers who soon appeared, along with people bearing donations of mask-making supplies and money.

“The whole thing had a big learning curve,” Calza said. “At the start, we had 18-hour days. There’s a lot to making masks. You’ve got to get the fabric, wash it, iron it, cut patterns, sew the seams and so much more. And then the distribution on top of it.

“I realized we needed help, so I reached out to friends. It was insane. I really didn’t think that many people would contact me. We had as many as 30 people at one point, though largely a core group of about 10. I couldn’t have done this without the amazing people who stepped up to help.”

Donations also poured in. Calza kept scrupulous track of monetary contributions and expenses; as things now stand, the project has broken even.

“The generosity of people was shocking,” Calza said. “They donated fabric, thread, money. A pizza place sent pizza. Someone sent Ziploc bags for the masks. Bolt Fabric helped us a lot in many ways, including contacting fabric distributors who sent boxes of fabric.”

Kate Barrett, owner of Cloverdale’s Bolt Fabric + Home, praised Calza’s efforts.

“Lynn’s good people,” she said. “In general, I think people buy fabric and make things to give to someone else as a gesture of love. It’s a nice coping mechanism to be able to do something positive in a negative moment.”

To date, of the more than 13,000 masks the family has made, 2,022 were donated to fire and police departments, including Santa Rosa, Rancho Adobe, Petaluma, Marin County, Monte Rio and Cloverdale fire departments, and the Petaluma Police Department.

In April 2020, Casa Grande High gave its meritorious “Golden Gaucho” award for outstanding work to Leilani and included her family in the honor. The announcement cited the more than 500 masks they had made to that point, which were donated to the staff at the local Safeway, the Petaluma Police Department and others.

Today, as they approach the project’s one-year anniversary, Calza and her teens have different but uniformly positive reflections.

“One of bigger things I learned is how something tiny can snowball into something huge very quickly,” Leilani said. “I also learned how willing some people are to help. There were tons of volunteers. People donated elastic and other stuff we needed. The worst times can bring out the best in people.”

“I definitely learned how to sew better,” Nila said. “I didn’t know how to use a machine before this, and it was cool to learn. I also saw how much of a caring and really involved person my mother is. She has taken this on so much and turned it into a whole family project with me and my sister, and it’s nice to see her doing something she loved. We spend a lot more time together now.”

Calza, who has long suffered from chronic pain due to a botched hysterectomy, said the project has given her a distraction from pain. She’s also been uplifted by the generosity of people who “stepped up to the plate, who volunteered to do anything and everything” to help the mask project succeed.

She noted that the project has deepened her relationship with her children.

“The act of kindness and giving isn’t new to our family, but the scale of the mask project far exceeded anything we have done in the past,” she said. “I want this level of kindness to be my legacy, something they will never forget and always strive to do.”