A Tragedy

By Sally A. Downey

Inquirer Staff Writer

A funeral for Ira Shaffer, president of the Pennsylvania and Delaware Chapter of Operation Homefront, will be at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Salvation Army, 1920 E. Allegheny Ave. Burial will be private. Mr. Shaffer, 57, of Fishtown, died Sunday at Hahnemann University Hospital from injuries suffered in a hit-and-run accident Dec. 5 outside the U.S. Post Office in Fishtown. Police are seeking the driver of a dark SUV with front-end damage.

Mr. Shaffer and his wife, Nancy Hayes Shaffer, had gone to the post office to mail envelopes from Operation Homefront donors. The organization, launched in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, assists active-duty National Guard and Reserve troops and their families, as well as wounded veterans.

When her husband was hit, Nancy Shaffer said, she watched the hundreds of envelopes he was carrying “going up in the air like snow.” She is grateful to postal workers who collected the envelopes and mailed them, she said.

Before joining Operation Homefront in September, Mr. Shaffer had been eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware donor-relations director for the Salvation Army for two years. He had been a development officer for several other nonprofits, including Volunteers of America Delaware Valley, the Visiting Nurse Association of South Jersey, and the Devereux Foundation.

He was passionate about his work and was proud of his success as a fund-raiser for causes that helped people, his wife said.

Mr. Shaffer graduated from Springfield High School in Montgomery County and earned a bachelor’s degree from La Salle University.

He was a community-relations director in the Philadelphia Managing Director’s Office in the 1970s and then was an advertising executive in New York City for three years before before joining the nonprofit sector.

A Civil War buff, Mr. Shaffer was president of the Friends of the USS Alligator. The Alligator, the first operational submarine to have an air-purifying system and the ability to deploy a diver while submerged, was built during the Civil War but sunk in a storm before seeing action.