A gift remembered

Good deed still bears fruit 

A FEW DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 2021, John Beldon came down with COVID-19 and was eventually placed on a ventilator for 13 days in a Bowling Green hospital. Doctors twice told his family that he might not live more than a few hours. 

Miraculously, on the 14th day, he opened his eyes and was able to breathe on his own, but unable to speak, and too weak to even hold a pencil. He has lingering health issues from the virus. 

But the experience brought a spiritual transformation that the 63-year-old retired construction project manager credits with a realization that he “needed to give something back”—though he wasn’t sure what he had to offer. 

Then, a memory from 50 years ago, when his parents were migrant farm workers and the family was living temporarily in Ceres, California, came back to inspire a project that now is helping Beldon and his wife, Bobbie, make Christmases happier for a few hundred youngsters. 

It traces to a single act of kindness shown John when he was 12. 

Near where his family lived, an old, bearded man restored and sold used bicycles. One day as Beldon was walking past, the man asked if he’d like to help around the shop, and soon after he began helping, he was told to pick out a bike for himself. 

“I’ve never forgotten,” says Beldon, who now lives in Russell County, next door to his native Casey County. “We were really poor, and I guess he noticed, when I’d hang out with other kids, that about everybody had a bicycle but me.” 

Half a century later and nearly 2,400 miles across the country, John Beldon is paying forward the old man’s kindness by restoring used bikes and giving them to children around south-central Kentucky. 

The past two Christmases, the Beldons have given bikes and toys to youngsters in several surrounding counties and provided nearly 150 bikes and countless other new and lightly used toys for distribution by their church, Casey County’s Creston Baptist, served by Taylor County RECC. 

Bobbie, who shops for toys all year, recalls the touching story of a nurse who picked up a bike and toys a few weeks before Christmas to fulfill the wish of a terminally ill mother who didn’t expect to live until December 25. She wanted to spend the last Christmas with her young daughter—several days early—around a Christmas tree that nurses had brought to her hospital room. 

Although the Beldons use their own funds to buy many bikes and toys, Charlie and Lisa Durbin, a retired EMT and social worker from Versailles, have become their major donors, and are helping the Beldons write a new chapter in the story of an old man’s long-ago gift of a used bicycle. 

“All I want people to do is give me their old bikes and give us some toys,” John Beldon says. “You’d have to be there to see these kids’ faces light up.”