Mill Valley 'Masketeer' Volunteer Group Sews Hope Amid Pandemic

MILL VALLEY, CA — They were strangers before the pandemic began. A year later, the Mill Valley “Masketeers” are still going strong.

Mill Valley resident Lee Budish started the group with a Nextdoor post recruiting neighbors to help sew masks for frontline workers in the early days of the coronavirus crisis.

Budish and her band of mask-making volunteers have since sewn over 14,500 facial coverings.

Things have slowed down since the early on in the pandemic, but as long as the demand for personal protective equipment is there, Budish and her fellow Masketeers will keep cranking them out, she says.

“In the early days there was a real urgency — we had hospitals, food banks, the Marin Community Clinics, Canal Alliance, Marin City, etc. begging us,” she said.

One day early in the pandemic she had a request for 10,000 masks.

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack that day,” she said.

The Masketeers have sent PPE to those in need throughout the Bay Area and as far as the Navajo nation in Arizona “because someone begged us,” Budish said.

The Masketeers are an entirely volunteer group and have been making masks on their own time and their own dime.

They haven’t accepted donations because they wanted to focus on their craft, not spreadsheets.

“We did not want to get involved in accounting/paperwork which would have bogged us down — we wanted to focus only on mask making and getting them out as fast as possible — and I mean really, really fast.”

Budish wasn’t exaggerating.

The push to get PPE to frontline medical workers in the early months of 2020 was frantic.

"We rushed like crazy to get 500 masks to the Redwoods Retirement Center the first week of April to keep them safe," she said.

The Retirement Center's staff and residents made a coronavirus-themed music video music video parody of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made for Walking” wearing Masketeer-made facials coverings.

“These walls are made for closin’, and that’s just what they’ll do," the coronavirus-themed lyrics go.

"We’re gonna keep coronavirus from pushin’ through.”

The “These Doors are Made for Closin’” video went viral last spring.

“In the early days we had 35 sewers round the clock,” she said.

“Remember, everything was closed — we couldn’t even shop online for fabric and supplies because everything was shut down. Everything was closed and fabric and elastic was unavailable for purchase. If you were lucky to find elastic —it was worth the price of gold. If one of us got it in first we would share with the other and so on and so on.

“We were raiding closets!”