Ron and Paula Silverman share Oh Boy! Manny's Cookies with Danielle Schmalfeldt, a Children's Hospital patient.

Take a son’s wish to honor his late father and a desire to put a smile on the faces of sick children. Add that father’s love of cookies. Stir in the help of a local bakery. Bake in oven, package, and you have Oh Boy! Manny’s Cookies. Serve to patients at MUSC Children’s Hospital.

Manny Silverman loved cookies. Even in the finest restaurants with the most exquisite desserts, he would ask for cookies, remembers his son, Ron Silverman. So what better way to honor him than to make special cookies bearing his name to be given not only to patients at MUSC Children’s Hospital, but campers at Camp Happy Days and Special Times and patients at the Children’s Medical Assessment Center.

Ron and Paula Silverman of Isle of Palms created Oh Boy! Manny’s Cookies in 1996. With more time on his hands after retirement, Ron wanted to do something for children. His wife Paula and the children in their neighborhood had been baking cookies for various charities, but to produce cookies on a larger scale would require the help of a professional baker.

Armed with cookie samples from Olde Colony Bakery in Charleston, the Silvermans looked to neighborhood children to perform a taste test to find the best cookie flavors. Naming the special cookies was easy—Manny’s Cookies, after the cookie lover himself. The “Oh Boy!,” Ron Silverman explains, was a phrase Manny used to say when he was happy or excited.

So far, the Silvermans have given away more than 3,000 bags of cookies —raspberry, lemon and ginger snaps. Soon they’ll be adding benne wafers to the list.

“A cookie can’t cure a child,” Ron Silverman said. “But we hope it can bring a bit of happiness to a sick or recovering child.”

Since August 1996, each month the Silverman's distribute cookies to the children at MUSC Children’s Hospital. On the first Thursday of each month the Children’s Hospital celebrates “cookie day” thanks to the generosity of Paula and Ron Silverman.