Clothing start-up aims to help fight breast cancer

Even in the face of Stage IV breast cancer, Kelly Rooney kept her sense of humor.

"Save Second Base," she said when her sister Erin Dugery and close friend Kelly Day asked her to name their team for a breast cancer walk.

Rooney - Wayne resident, mother of five - had been diagnosed in 2003. She had no family history of the disease and a record of clear mammograms.

In July 2006, as she lay dying, Rooney gave Dugery and Day a challenge: "What are you going to do to make sure my girls don't get breast cancer?" They responded by launching Save 2nd Base, a company named after Rooney's playful sentiment.

Its signature product is a flamingo-pink T-shirt with baseballs strategically placed at chest level. "Pink with a wink" is the company's motto.

Half of the money raised by Save 2nd Base goes to the Kelly Rooney Foundation, an affiliated nonprofit started by Rooney's husband that has pledged $500,000 to breast cancer research at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

The remainder of Save 2nd Base profits support breastcancer.org, an organization dedicated to providing women with complete, up-to-date information about the disease. Save 2nd Base has pledged a total of $100,000 to education causes.

The goals are lofty. But the women are motivated by memories of Rooney, who died at 43 and remained a spunky, funny and vibrant force until the end.

"She always wanted to be that mom whose house all the kids in the neighborhood came to," Dugery said.

And she was. The home she shared with husband Sean, of the Pittsburgh Steelers Rooneys, and Casey, Haley, Molly, Quinn and Jack was always abuzz with energy, life and children.

Her family was well-off, but Rooney was down-to-earth and famous for her outrageous acts of generosity - slipping money into a friend's wallet, dropping her new coat off on another's porch after receiving a compliment from the friend, paying for a fancy gym membership for the daughter of a friend who couldn't afford it, Day and Dugery say.

Even as she was dying, Rooney directed friends to drive her to buy things for her church, things for her family. She asked them for help - when third daughter Quinn gets married, she told one, make sure Sean doesn't make her wear one of her older sisters' hand-me-down wedding gowns.

"To know your fate and to still be able to laugh and know what's important, I think that's the epitome of courage. Kelly taught us what was important," Dugery said.

Rooney would have loved the ruckus the shirts sometimes create among those who think their message is too direct, even vulgar.

"They're a very in-your-face thing, but cancer is a very in-your-face thing. Watching someone die before your eyes, it can't be any more in-your-face than that," Dugery said.

The strategy appears to be working. The shirts, available in boutiques such as Patricia Adams in Haverford and BE Monograms in Chestnut Hill, and online, are now being shipped around the world. Save 2nd Base has attracted national attention for its products and the story behind them.

"The shirts are like a virus," Dugery said. "We're trying to start a movement."

It's all been a learning experience for Day and Dugery, a single mother and waitress with three children and a stay-at-home mother with four children, respectively.

At first, the business was tiny. They invested almost $10,000 of their own money to trademark the logo and pay initial expenses.

They operated out of their car trunks. They put their cell-phone numbers on their Web site and were thrilled to get four orders in a week. These days, they average 30 orders a day; to date, 10,000 shirts have been moved.

After the company started getting attention, their little operation was overwhelmed. After one surge of orders, they set up an assembly line in Day's Bryn Mawr dining room.

"We had every little kid on the block stuffing shirts," said Day, 42, laughing. "We had a looseleaf notebook, and we would write down what we sent out. Twice, so we didn't make mistakes."

They hope to take a night course in business someday, but for now, "we're learning about the T-shirt business, wholesaling, registering as a company, as we go," said Dugery, 37. "We had to pull on our big-girl pants and learn how to do it all."

Save 2nd Base recently upgraded its office, moving into a small room over Dugery's Newtown Square garage, a warm, hectic attic where exercise equipment competes for space with merchandise folded on long tables and placed in storage bins.

Besides the shirts, which cost $20 to $29, Save 2nd Base offers hats and car magnets. Shirts for men also are available.

And though they're toiling days, nights and weekends to make Save 2nd Base work, they're also mindful of what comes first - if someone has basketball practice, mom is driving them and orders wait.

They know that there are hundreds of worthy breast cancer causes, but they're trying to stand apart from the ubiquitous pink of October. They hope that Rooney's story, and her unique logo, give them an edge.

"She wasn't a saint - the goal isn't to canonize Kelly. She was a regular person that had to deal with an extraordinary set of circumstances, and she rose to the occasion," Dugery said.

In many ways, the company has brought the two up from the depths of their grief. Many orders come with messages - "Keep fighting" or "In honor of my mom." Those stories are a balm to Day and Dugery.

"It's important to know that my nieces and my nephew know that their mom made her mark on the world," Dugery said. "As her sister, it's my job to put an exclamation point on that."

For information, contact Save 2nd Base at:

Address: Save 2nd Base

648 San Marino Ave.

Bryn Mawr, Pa. 19010

Phone: 610-355-2488

Web: www.save2ndbase.comEndText