DANNY WANNAGE

Karla Wall Wednesday, January 8, 2014 Comments Off on DANNY WANNAGE
DANNY WANNAGE

“I Owe Them My Life”   Local Man Gives To Students At St. Louis, Receives It Back Tenfold

By Karla Wall

Danny Wannage has worked hard all his life — as a manual laborer and an auto parts store manager, among other jobs.

In late 2009, Wannage, feeling retirement age creeping up on him, decided to try to find a position that would be a good retirement job for him: that would allow him some income and benefits throughout his retirement years. In December of 2009, he began work as a janitor at St. Louis High School.

It was a perfect fit for Wannage, who says he’s “always loved kids.”

Wannage became far more to the students of St. Louis than the person who cleaned the school’s floors. He developed friendships with the students and staff; worked with the sports teams, “cleaning uniforms, getting food for them after the games, whatever they needed.” He went to all the school’s games. He gave boxes of candy and small gifts to special needs students at the school. If a parent had to bring lunch to a student after school had started, Wannage met the parent in the parking lot and brought the student’s lunch to his or her locker.

He loved the kids, and they loved him. “It was totally the opposite of how you’d expect a janitor to be treated,” Wannage says. “No one looked down on me. It was a great relationship.”

As much as Wannage gave the students at St. Louis, he’d end up receiving it back tenfold.

Wannage had been having back problems for some time when he began working at St. Louis. His doctor had told him he’d need surgery, and Wannage waited until summer break of 2011 to have it done. Everything was supposed to be so simple, he says — a guaranteed 99-percent success rate. He thought the surgery would be the end of it.

It was the beginning of a two-year-long nightmare.

“I was doing well after the surgery,” he says. “But a few days after the surgery, I got up from sitting and heard a loud popping, and there was a lot of pain in one of my legs.”

The nerves in Wannage’s leg had been damaged, and he was told he’d require another surgery to correct this problem. He had the procedure, and told St. Louis he would be back to work by March 17 of 2012.

He wouldn’t make that date.

A couple of days after the surgery to repair the nerve damage, he noticed pain and swelling at the incision site. A nurse practitioner at his doctor’s office told him to simply put a heating pad on the site, which did relieve the swelling. But the next day, Wannage found he couldn’t even walk. He’d require yet another procedure, one of six or seven yet to come.

By this time, Wannage had had no income for nearly a year, and was facing losing his home, an apartment near the Prien Lake Mall.

“I was about to be homeless,” he says. “I’d even talked to the Salvation Army about a space in a shelter.”

Wannage and former St. Louis baseball players Chris Stout in 2011

Wannage and former St. Louis baseball players Chris Stout in 2011

Wannage had been attending church regularly throughout this period, and one Sunday, as Wannage was at perhaps the lowest point of his life, a guest speaker gave the sermon.

“He said, ‘I don’t care if you have absolutely nothing. I don’t care if you’ve lost everything. It isn’t over until God says it’s over,’” Wannage recalls.

Three days later, Wannage would learn the truth of that statement.

“I was sitting at a bus stop, waiting to take a bus back home, and one of the students from St. Louis passed by. He stopped, turned around and came back by. He asked how I was doing, and asked if I wanted a ride home. On the way to my apartment, we were talking, and I told him what had been going on, and what my situation was.”

A few days later, the student went to the administration at St. Louis and asked if he could begin a collection for “Mr. Danny.” The administration agreed, and a couple of days later, Wannage received the shock of his life.

“Several students and a couple of the parents visited my apartment, and told me they’d collected money for me,” Wannage says. “To this day, I don’t know how much it was, but it must have been in the thousands. I told them to keep the money and manage it, and pay my bills.”

The students also told Wannage that they wanted to help him get out of his apartment, which was in a rather crime-ridden neighborhood, and move to another, safer location. They put down a deposit on a new apartment on Enterprise Blvd.

The students paid Wannage’s bills each month with the donated money, gave him money each week for food and medicine, visited him regularly to see if he needed anything, bought groceries for him, and treated him to the “best Christmas I’ve ever had,” giving him a television and other gifts. They picked him up and brought him to school sports games. The baseball team even brought him along to the state championship last year — Wannage traveled with the team, meals and room provided, and attended the game.

“They’ve given me so much,” Wannage says simply. “I’ve never felt so loved in my life.”

To this day, he says, students still call, visit and check up on him. And they still take him to St. Louis High games.

“One student brought me $200 the other day,” he says. “He bought groceries for me.”

Wannage is up and around now, and despite some pain and weakness in his leg, he’s doing well physically. Though St. Louis High couldn’t hold his job for him throughout his long recovery, he’s looking for work elsewhere. And he’s optimistic about his future now, thanks to those students from St. Louis.

“(The students’ generosity) has given me a whole new outlook on life,” Wannage says. “And a new respect for the new generation coming up. You hear all of the bad things about kids nowadays, but there are good young people out there. I was about to be homeless, and these students and their parents opened their arms to me. I owe them my life.”

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