Bunco Babes: rolling for a cure

It started as a way to get out on a Monday evening, to break the diet with excellent hors d’oeuvres and share that special sort of camaraderie available to women round a card table with a pair of dice in play.

They met at each other’s homes on the third Monday of every month, 12 fast friends, ostensibly to play Bunco, a kind of “Yahtzee^® for grownups,” but mainly to make time for each other.

One evening, organizer Kathy Pimentel thought to share her experiences about the Salinas Relay for Life, an annual walkathon for the American Cancer Society that begins on a Friday at 6 p.m. and continues into the next day. The event is the largest in California and the third largest in the nation.

Introduced to this all-night fundraiser by a friend, Pimentel felt an immediate passion for the cause and commitment to the event, having lost both parents to cancer, as well as her aunt and uncle and, on the day of the 2003 relay, her infant godson.

“You just cannot adequately explain to people the feeling you get from attending the relay and staying throughout the night,” Pimentel says.

As the discussion continued around the card table, the Bunco players revealed how each of their lives had, in fact, been touched by cancer. By the end of the night they, too, felt compelled to get involved in the Relay for Life.

Bunco Babes (and dude) — Top photo, from left: Susan Rowland, Anne Oda, Sue McFeron, and Mark Pivec. Bottom photo, from left (front row): Susan Rowland, Sue McFeron, (back row) Tanya Mellen, Carolyn Mellen, Tami Sojka, Anne Oda, and Wendy Matz.

The result was “Bunco Babes Rolling for a Cure,” a relay team of now 16 members that returned to the event this summer. The team, which planned to raise $7,000 this year toward the fight against cancer, resurrected it’s award-winning retro booth, decorated with their signature dice motif.

“Our booth is a place for teammates to rest and regroup,” says Bunco Babe Susan Rowland, director of Medical Staff Services for Community Hospital. “It’s also a place to receive educational information about cancer, honor survivors and, this year, remember baby Wylie Mitchell, who died, at 4-and-a-half months, during last year’s relay, from cancer of the liver. We were passionate about this before, but that really drove home the cause and why we’re doing this.”