The Maryland SPCA's 20th annual March for the Animals will be the last for Aileen Gabbey.
Gabbey, of Lake Evesham, has risen from a volunteer to executive director of the Hampden-based nonprofit, and has watched the March for the Animals grow from a small fundraiser to the SPCA's signature event, with vendors as well as thousands of walkers.
"It's more than just a walk. It's a festival," Gabbey said. "People love their pets. It's a happy, happy day, a nice way to spend a Sunday."
This Sunday, April 26, as an expected 3,000 to 5,000 people and their pets descend on Druid Hill Park for the march around the lake from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Gabbey, 44, will be on hand for one last time, walkie-talkie in hand, with a small army of staff and volunteers. She is resigning after 18 years because her husband, Neil, a middle-school teacher and volleyball coach at Gilman School, has accepted a teaching job at Savannah Country Day School in Georgia.
The SPCA's board of directors has formed a search committee for her successor, she said.
Gabbey, a warm-weather person at heart, said she won't miss Baltimore's winters and that the couple had been thinking about moving south for some time. But she will miss the organization and the march that she has led for much of the past 20 years.
"It makes me sad," she said.
The first annual March for the Animals was held in 1996 on a Johns Hopkins University parking lot at the entrance to Wyman Park, according to Kay Terry, then a Maryland SPCA board member, who helped organize the inaugural march.
"We had no idea of how many people and dogs would attend the first year and were amazed to see a stream of cars passing the campus with dogs hanging out the windows," Terry said. "About 400 people showed up, many with more than one dog. I think at least one pig joined the march for a while."
Terry, of Woodlawn, said she and then-executive director Debbie Thomas were encouraged at the time that the event raised $31,000 and might have staying power. But, she said, "Hitting the 20-year mark was beyond my dreams."
Meanwhile, Gabbey and her husband moved to Baltimore from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where he was a teacher. Gabbey started at the SPCA as a volunteer in 1996, too late for the first march.
"I missed it," she said regretfully.
The next year, Gabbey landed a paid job with the organization as its coordinator of events and volunteers — and one of her duties was to organize the second annual march, which raised $41,000.
In 1998, she succeeded Thomas as executive director. She and the board have grown the organization substantially since then. In 2010, the SPCA's campus above Falls Road underwent a $1.8 million expansion, partly funded by the family of the late Morton Gorn, a real estate developer and animal lover.
The organization, with a staff of 80 and more than 1,000 volunteers, now does 9,000 spays and neuters a year, and finds homes for 3,500 adoptable pets a year.
Full circle
On Sunday, Gabbey will come full circle as she helps run the March for the Animals, which has become the face of the SPCA and all that it does.
Last year, the event raised $386,000 and the SPCA's goal for this year's event is $400,000. Each participant pays a registration fee of $40 to walk about 1.5 miles around the park. The proceeds of the event go toward sheltering, feeding, spaying and neutering homeless pets at the Maryland SPCA's adoption center at 3300 Falls Road, as well as treating the animals for any medical problems.
Adoptable pets will also be on hand at the march that eligible people may take home right then and there.
In the past 20 years, the March for the Animals has raised $4.3 million, nearly as much as the SPCA's annual budget.
The march has also become a magnet for food vendors and organizations such as animal rescue groups, which set up tables and tents. The march also now includes related activities, such as a costume contest for pets.
The march has attracted not only dogs through the years, but the occasional pig, snake and goat, as well as a bird on a woman's shoulder, a hairless cat in a baby carriage, and a giant tortoise named Darwin.
This year's event will include a pet ambassador for the first time — once-homeless Lotus, who survived major surgery after being hit by a car as a puppy last year and has since been adopted by a woman who worked at the veterinary office where the surgery was performed.
"The festival component has grown over the years," Gabbey said. "I tried to bring my dog one year and it did not go well. He was distracted by every scrap of food."
Some people even bring stuffed animals as a way of honoring loved ones — humans and pets — who have died, Gabbey said.
Romeo Santos, a sergeant first-class and career counselor for the Army, stationed at Fort Meade, goes even further each year to honor his late wife, Tracy, who died in 2011 of stage 4 breast cancer at age 30. Tracy Santos, an ardent volunteer for the SPCA, was active in the march, even in the last years of her life, forming a fundraising team or "pack" of family members and friends called the Baltimore Bark Brigade.
Romeo Santos, 34, of Morrell Park, has carried on that tradition, and the pack, now renamed Tracy's Baltimore Bark Brigade, has raised more than $60,000 since it started, much of it through the Baltimore Orioles' High Five fundraising program.
"I have to do it every year," Santos said. "I have to. It's my passion. At some point, I have to move on. But I'd like to raise $250,000 before I stop."
Caylee Joy Ellis, of Parkville, is only 6, but already a veteran participant in and fundraiser for the march. Caylee and her family are animals lovers and have raised more than $2,000 for the SPCA through family friend Lynda Frueh's pack, Tails of Destruction.
Caylee, who was born the same week as the 2009 march, has walked in the march since she was a toddler, except for last year, when her mother, Melissa, gave birth to Caylee's sister, Paige, who was born the day before last year's march. This year, the march falls on Paige's first birthday.
"So, that's how we're going to spend the day," Melissa Ellis said.
Stronger SPCA
Elizabeth Drigotas, president of the SPCA board of directors, can't bring her own pet — "My cat, Penelope doesn't like to march," she said — but the Roland Park resident plans to walk with her daughter's adopted dogs, Zeniba and Ziggy.
She's excited about the march and seeing so many people there who have adopted pets from the SPCA.
But for Drigotas, Sunday will be bittersweet because of Gabbey leaving.
"I'm excited for her, but I'm sorry to see her go," Drigotas said. "She's leaving the SPCA a lot stronger."
Gabbey feels good about how the SPCA's growth and future, including opening a satellite adoption center in White Marsh Mall and planning more such community outreach efforts.
"I think that's where the organization is headed," Gabbey said, noting that she and the board do a strategic plan every three years. "We're always looking to the future. The animals deserve that."
But that is for the next director.
"I won't be here," Gabbey said.