Delivering so much more than newspapers

By Sue Baldani

When COVID-19 shut down the world, Greg Daily, the owner of Frames on Main in Chatham and a long-time West Windsor newspaper delivery man, put his unexpected free time to good use.

“It all started with a simple phone call I received from one of the seniors on my route,” says Greg. “She called to ask if I could throw the newspaper closer to the house. A couple of days later I happened to be standing in my local grocery store and she popped into my head, so I called to see if she needed anything.”

After that, he put a note into every one of his customers’ papers offering his shopping services for free.

“Before COVID, I never went to the grocery store, so I took on something I was very unfamiliar with,” he says. “The first person to call me was Linda Contiliano, and this is how I knew this was meant to be.” When he was a teenager, her husband Ross was his baseball coach and gave him the stability he needed at a difficult time in his life. It was his chance to pay it back.

At this point, he’s not even sure how many families he’s helped; he stopped counting at 145. He now has 12 volunteers, including those from his own family. He even continued helping after losing his mother to COVID-19 in December.

For his tremendous service to others, he was named one of Time magazine’s Heroes of 2020. “I get so much more out of this than the people I’m helping. It completes my day on a very positive note.”\

Written for Chatham & Short Hills Lifestyle magazine in New Jersey.