ESCONDIDO
Ron Lonicki needs a kidney, and like many of the patients on the national waiting list for donor organs, he knows it could be a five- to six-year wait.
But the 63-year-old Escondido man is hoping that his family will come through for him with a live donor organ sooner than that. With more than 500,000 family members to call on for help, he might just be in luck.
For the past 27 years, Lonicki has been a member of Kiwanis International, a service club where members call each other family. As Lonicki’s career in the gaming industry took him to cities all over the country, he donated his time and money to clubs in Wisconsin, Delaware, Maryland, Louisiana and California, and picked up many family members along the way.