Thanksgiving Baskets May Be Scarce for Needy

Workers at Orange County Indian Center Inc. call them “on-the-road baskets,” brown paper bags filled with bread, a can of Spam and, maybe, baked beans.

The homeless families who will file through the center’s tiny Garden Grove office this holiday season call them Thanksgiving dinner.

“We’re anticipating giving out 30 or 40 ‘on-the-road baskets,’ ” said Jack Stafford, the council’s executive director. “We try to give those to the transient people. What could those people do with a turkey, except maybe sell it? So we give them canned goods so they can at least make a meal. We try to help them make the holiday at least livable.”

Although official county figures show some letup in the number of needy families, administrators of many local groups that feed the hungry contend that the ranks of the poor continue to grow in Orange County.

Trouble Meeting Need

And many of those groups will have trouble meeting the need, their spokesmen say, especially this holiday season.

“We have far more requests than we can possibly touch,” Stafford said. The Indian center will be able to provide 65 food baskets with complete turkey dinners this Thanksgiving, he said. It has received more than 250 requests so far.

“We have approximately 665 client families,” he said. “That represents nearly 4,000 individuals who receive ongoing food assistance at least on a monthly basis, and it’s doubled from last year.”

That presents Stafford’s organization with a difficult problem: which pleas to refuse.

“This Christmas, we’re working on a list to give out complete food baskets to 400 families,” Stafford said. “Seven hundred have already signed up. We have to make the decision of who gets and who doesn’t get.”

Few County Statistics

Orange County government keeps few statistics on the homeless and the hungry here. But county demographers say providers of emergency food, such as Stafford, have the best knowledge of whether the need has increased.

“The county has not and will not project the number of homeless because it’s so hard to do in any kind of valid manner,” said John Webb, an administrative analyst for the county. “It changes daily. And the very nature of a person being homeless makes them hard to count.”

According to the 1980 census, 138,484 county residents were below the federal poverty level. Orange County’s unemployment rate was only 4.4% in September, the most recent figure available, said Greg Lepore, a county research analyst. That figure was down from 4.5% during the same month last year, and it compares with 7.6% in California and 7.1% nationwide.

“All these things will tell you that Orange County is a relatively affluent county,” Lepore said, “but there are homeless people here.”

Last June, the county surveyed the number of people on general relief to find out how many were homeless, Webb said. They found that about 30 of the 1,500 on relief had no homes, and another 72 who came for assistance for the first time were homeless.

The figures provided by service organizations for the needy are a stark contrast to the relatively rosy picture presented by official county statistics.

“We’ve seen a lot more homeless people and a lot more hungry people,” said Jean Forbath, executive director of the Costa Mesa-based Share Our Selves, which collects and distributes food throughout the county.

“In recent weeks the need seems to be up,” she said. “Our average is 16,000 to 17,000 (hungry people served) per month. We had 19,000 last month. November will be high, too. Last Tuesday, we had 267 families in one day come to us for help. That’s our record. We’ve had over 200 lots of times, but never that many.”

‘Going to Bed Hungry’

Although many of the Orange County organizations that serve the hungry collect much of their food on their own, most depend at least in part on the Food Distribution Center in Orange, which is run by the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

Dan Harney runs the food bank, and he contends that 15% of the county’s population, or an estimated 320,000 men, women and children, are “at risk of going to bed hungry at night.” The center distributes salvaged food and government surplus commodities to 179 organizations in the county--up from about 40 groups when it was founded in October, 1983.

Harney estimates that the food bank reaches 120,000 hungry people each month through these organizations. “We’re only getting out four to five pounds of food per individual per month, and we’re only reaching probably one-third of the people who are at risk in the county.”

At St. Justin Martyr church in Anaheim, Paul Diaz, the parishioner in charge of the food giveaway program, said, “There’s a very good chance that we won’t be able to meet the need” this Thanksgiving. “There’s more need and less help--that’s about the size of it,” he said.

70 Turkeys Short

The church is planning a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner from 1 to 3 p.m. Thursday for the area’s needy and also hopes to distribute 150 baskets with turkey dinner fixings. But the group is still 70 turkeys short.

“The turkeys are getting harder to get,” Diaz said. “The price range is so high--from 89 cents to $1.39 a pound. We distribute food year-round, and we only have so much to budget to work with. We operate on $30,000 a year, and toward this part of the year, it’s getting kind of low.”

The Orange County branch of Corazon Inc. is in an equally tight situation. The Garden Grove-based organization helps people in Mexico and some people in Buena Clinton, said Lucy Gonzales, one of two volunteers who help the Buena Clinton residents.

“We service about 107 families--about 600 people” Gonzales said. “There’s more there, but those are the ones we service usually. And we’ll never get 107 turkeys. . . . We have some canned stuff, but we won’t even get close.”

‘You Really Want to Help’

Capt. Joseph Huttenlocker of the Salvation Army said his Anaheim group will serve a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner to 250 or 300 people, and the organization also has plans to distribute 100 baskets to families with a home in which to cook.

“Things have been coming in really well” for the Thanksgiving dinner, Huttenlocker said. “But the heaviest time of need follows Thanksgiving--Christmas. That’s a time of year when you really want to help families so they don’t feel left out. We expect between 700 and 1,000 families this year; we had just over 600 last year.”

A 39-year-old Santa Ana woman typifies many of the county’s needy during this holiday season. The woman, who requested anonymity, is an unemployed mother of three who depends on Jack Stafford’s Indian center to feed her children every month.

“I am a low-income family,” the woman said. “It’s hard to get through the months. I get $129 in food stamps and that’s not very much for my growing kids. I go to them (the Indian center) and I get juices, vegetables. It really helps me get to the first of the month.

“I asked them at the center how to get a Thanksgiving basket,” she said. “They can’t help me this Thanksgiving, but they’re trying to help me find another organization to get a basket, or I wouldn’t have no turkey this year. They said they’ll help me for Christmas, though.”

Free Turkey Dinners for the Needy

These Orange County businesses and service organizations are providing free turkey dinners for those in need on Thanksgiving Day: Salvation Army, 201 E. Cypress St., Anaheim, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. St. Justin Martyr, 2050 W. Ball Road, Anaheim, 1 to 3 p.m. Harbor Christian Fellowship and Christ Lutheran Church, 760 W. Victoria Street, Costa Mesa, 1 to 4 p.m. El Ranchito Restaurant, 2101 Placentia Ave., Costa Mesa, 2 to 6 p.m.