Secret Smiles mission is to provide beds, cribs and bedding to children in the Dayton community who are without. With the help of Morris Home Furnishings we have helped more that 1,000 children!
Dayton Daily News, February 1, 2005By Tom Archdeacon
His mug often makes the sports page. He has a weekly show on television and he’s pictured on the front of the University of Dayton’s basketball media guide. On the UD Arena sideline — where he’s always moving, gesturing, emoting — he’s a focal point of the crowds that pack the place game after game after game.
More than anyone, Brian Gregory is the face of Flyers’ basketball.
Yet, there are times when the UD coach is at his best and he goes totally unnoticed.
That’s the secret part of Secret Smiles.
But it’s the smiles part that makes Gregory realize some of his most rewarding moments come not with a hoop and a ball, but with the beds and bedding he quietly delivers to a children who have none.
Gregory, and especially his wife Yvette, joined Tracy Janess and her husband and three other area couples to launch Secret Smiles of Dayton, a local charity whose work was initially inspired by Tracy’s late sister, Kristy Irvine Ryan.
A UD grad, Kristy was a 30-year-old equities trader for New York-based Sandler O’Neill and Partners. She was working at the banking firm’s 104th floor offices in the World Trade Center’s South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew hijacked airliners into her building and the North Tower.
Although she was killed in the attack — as were 66 other Sandler O’Neill employees — her legacy not only has survived, it has flourished.
Along with a successful business woman and a new bride — she’d married just three months earlier— Kristy was a tireless advocate and generous benefactor of impoverished children, battered women and any family in need.
She and Meredith O’Neill Hassett — a Harlem kindergarten teacher who had been her best friend from fourth grade, through their years together at UD, right up to the night before the attacks when they went to dinner together — had begun a small, nonprofit charity in New York. They called it Secret Smiles, Inc. because they and some of their friends helped people anonymously.
A year and a half ago, Janess and three of her friends — Stephanie Geehan, Molly Treese and Leslie Miller — launched the Dayton version of Secret Smiles.
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