A Superstar Captain Heads Off to College
Samantha Marshall is an 18-year-old who adores her parents and calls her younger brother “my best friend in the universe.”
As if that weren’t odd enough, at the age of 10, Samantha gave up parties in favor of rallying friends to participate in a Walk MS event that always came around her birthday in April. She named the team the Double Digit Superstars (because she was turning the big one-oh) and as of 2008 they’ve raised more than $135,000 for the Southern New York Chapter. Samantha goes to college in the fall, thanks in part to a National MS Society scholarship, so 14-year-old Daniel will take over as captain.
It was perfectly logical, in a child’s-eye-view-of-the-world sort of way, for little Samantha to want to spend her special day raising money and awareness for the MS movement. Her birthday is the same as her mother Cindy’s birthday… Cindy was diagnosed with MS a few months after Samantha’s birth… every spring cards would come in the mail asking them to come to the walk.
“Most people do sponsor. It’s really rare that you get a no. It could be $5, but it’s still something,” she said.
“This year was hard because business is bad. If somebody clearly doesn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t push them, because I wouldn’t want to be pushed.”
Samantha’s parents met when both were police officers. Her father John is now a fire captain; Cindy has her own business delivering hors d’oeuvres to country clubs.
“She does it all by herself, which totally amazes me. She’s always carrying boxes, doing paperwork,” Samantha said.
While Cindy has some physical symptoms, such as pain in her hands and occasional double vision, her mobility is largely intact, Samantha said. The main symptom she has noticed is absentmindedness:
“You have to explain things to her more than once, and being teenagers that aggravates me and my brother very much, because she asks the same question like 30 times, and you don’t want to upset her so you just answer.”
In high school, Samantha was involved in several service clubs and worked four nights a week as a restaurant hostess. Now she is preparing to move about two hours away to college. She’s thinking of majoring in criminal psychology and going to work for the FBI someday.
College will be the first time in her life that she’s been away from her family for more than two nights.
“I’m ready to get out of here. It’s just sad because we are a close family,” she said.
The 2009 walk event will be on Samantha and Cindy’s birthday. Exams or no exams, the Double Digit Superstars will walk with their founder.
“I’m definitely coming home,” Samantha said.