PORTLAND, TEXAS — For our inaugural KRIS 6 Angel, we chose someone we first introduced you to in December, when her incredible gesture gave a disabled veteran the gift of mobility.
Carol Mauch says her sense of giving probably came from her parents, as well as the nuns at the elementary school she attended in Queens, NY. She says that’s why when she hear Robert Ainsworth’s story, she knew what had to be done.
“I’d been trying to figure out what to do with that wheelchair,” said Mauch.
Mauch’s father, Andrew D’angelo passed away in May, leaving behind a brand-new motorized wheelchair. She was thinking of selling it, until she saw Ainsworth featured on Veterans in Focus. Ainsworth had been trying to get his wheelchair fixed.
“I talked to one of the doctors who’s in charge of the wheelchair deal who says they requested three different times to take care of it,” Ainsworth told Veterans in Focus on December 2 of last year.
“It was like boom, no doubt what we wanted to do with it,” said Mauch.
Mauch called the Veterans in Focus Hotline, offering her dad’s wheelchair. Two days later, that wheelchair was delivered to Ainsworth.
“I was so glad I got to meet him, just to be there and see them and know that it went to a good place,” Mauch said. “I knew it did and I know my dad was watching.”
Mauch’s father served with the U.S. Army’s 5th Infantry Division in World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
“Dad was a very intelligent man, a religious man,” said Mauch. “He had a temper now and then, he was Italian.”
Mauch believes her father would have been happy to see his wheelchair go to a fellow veteran in Ainsworth, who served in the U.S. Navy, and was wounded in Vietnam.
For her, it was a chance to feel normal at the end of a year that was anything but.
“Since COVID, there’s so little that we can do anymore,” said Mauch. “So you don’t really have those opportunities to say I feel good today, I did something.”
She certainly did something that December morning, something Mauch chalks up to fate.
“Everything was aligned, for me to happen to watch, for you to be doing it, him to need it, I had the wheelchair; that’s a God thing,” Mauch said.
Mauch’s father’s last name, her maiden name, D’Angelo, translates to ‘of the angels’ in Italian.
