'Charlie's Coolers' go viral, providing free drinks to hot workers worldwide

NEW MILFORD, New Jersey — In New Jersey, a woman is keeping her late husband's act of summer kindness alive.

And that goodwill is going viral, being repeated around the world.

On a 100-degree day eight years ago, Charlie Poveromo, longtime bartender and construction worker, looked out his kitchen window and saw the sanitation workers picking up his trash struggling in the brutal heat.

Charlie grabbed a pitcher of ice water, some chairs and let them take a rest in his yard.

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"He was just that type of guy. He paid attention," said his wife Velvet Poveromo.

The next week, and every summer pickup day after that, Charlie left a stocked cooler for the men to take what they wanted. It was a small gesture of appreciation for the dirtiest, toughest, most thankless of jobs.

"It's like a checkpoint, it's like a second breath of fresh air," said one worker. "The Gatorades, the cakes, get us through the rest of the routes, so we appreciate that."

Then in March, Charlie, father of two and beloved grandfather, died suddenly of a heart attack.

When summer returned, Velvet, his wife of 37 years, looked outside that window and realized she had to put Charlie's cooler back out.

"I couldn't let it go. It was part of who he was," said Velvet.

She keeps Charlie's cooler stocked on hot summer days. She does it for the workers, for Charlie and his memory -- and eventually, she realized, for herself.

"For me, it actually helped heal me. I'm not done healing," said Velvet.

She posted her story to Facebook.

Soon her inbox was lighting up with photos of other people putting out their own Charlie's Coolers.

Pictures showed them everywhere from a roadside in the Virgin Islands to the shade of a Florida palm tree.

In California, Japan, Italy and more, Charlie's Coolers became a viral act of kindness started by a guy from Jersey who looked out his window and saw some sliver of himself, some shared humanity, in the guys collecting his trash.

"So it just keeps growing. It started out with this. A cooler on a lawn," said Velvet.

CNN