In August 2015, Petrina Johnson wrote in the Houston Chronicle’s Magnolia section about Jimmy Wayne Rogers Jr., a 2006 Tomball High School graduate who had just come home from a deployment on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. After joining the Navy in 2011, he moved back to Tomball and put his energy into Boots For Troops, a nonprofit he had begun that May.
Rogers told the paper the packages would carry a new pair of personal boots, cowboy boots a service member could wear out of uniform, along with gift cards and fitness gear. He said the work was something he could not have imagined four years earlier, and that the Navy had given him a way to prove he could finish what he started.
Early sponsors Torque Right and All Floors and Moore, plus neighbors in Tomball and Magnolia, helped the new shop raise $5,000 in 45 days. Rogers’s aim, then as now, was simple: remind a deployed service member that somebody back home cares.
Stand With Those Who Serve
Every package, flight home, scholarship, and act of relief starts with someone who decided to show up.