Even as her lights were being turned off, Tiffany Stroman said she never was bitter toward her utility carrier, SCE&G.
The Cayce-based utility giant had worked with Stroman even as she fell behind by $700, she said, but the company finally told the 41-year-old — out of work since April — that she had to come up with $225 by 3 p.m. on a certain date in order to keep her lights on.
“I couldn’t pay the bill,” said Stroman, who had worked for banking giant Wachovia in Charlotte for eight years before its merger with Wells Fargo and most recently was let go from a grocery store job. “Making $100 a week (in unemployment benefits), I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
With help from her friends, Stroman said she was able to scrape together $180. A friend had pledged to lend her the balance the day her power was set for disconnection, but the power company beat the reinforcement funds to her house by about an hour.
Ultimately, it was the Salvation Army’s Woodyard Fund that came to the single mother’s rescue, paying $400 of her bill to get power restored for her and her two sons, ages 18 and 6.
“The Salvation Army was so sweet to me,” Stroman said recently, after cold temperatures invaded Columbia in November. “They were just like angels.”
The fund traces its origins to 1816, when the Ladies Benevolent Society provided firewood and, later, coal to families in need. The society turned management of the charity over to the Salvation Army around the turn of the 20th century.
In 1930, William E. Gonzales, then editor of The State, began publicizing the fund and those it helped, a tradition the newspaper continues each winter.
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