Dinner for the Homeless Nearly a Washout : Sponsors Search in the Rain for Needy to Share Early Thanksgiving

Rich Taylor and Geoffery Brancato were wondering where their next meal would come from Sunday when a man walked up to them and asked if they would like a free dinner.

The two had ducked into a Van Nuys social service agency to get out of the rain when they were approached with the offer.

Bob Herman, an advocate for the homeless at First United Methodist Church in Van Nuys, drove them and several others to his Tyrone Avenue church for an early Thanksgiving dinner. Then, Herman headed back out to other places where he thought he might find homeless people to tell them about the feast.

“I guess the word just didn’t get out,” Herman said. “So, if they won’t come to us, we’ll go to them.”

The church, along with the San Fernando Valley Friends of Homeless Women and Children, had cooked enough ham dinners to serve 300 people. They said they had told agencies that deal with the homeless about the dinner but had done little else to publicize the event.

The tables in the church fellowship hall were neatly set. Boy Scouts stood ready to serve the dinners. Small, hand-painted signs, which had all but been obliterated by the rain, were posted around the church grounds to announce the event.

‘Jackpot’ for Poor Couple

However, at 2 p.m., the time the dinner was scheduled to start, only one elderly couple, who said they were poor but not homeless, had shown up.

“Boy, we sure hit the jackpot this time,” the woman said. “This is delicious.”

The Rev. Glen Haworth, church pastor, blamed the low turnout on the rain.

Taylor and Brancato were among about 50 people the sponsors found and brought back to the church for the dinner. The two said they and the others probably would not have known about the feast if Herman had not come to them.

Both men said they had slept in the bushes near a freeway the previous night. They had taken showers at People In Progress, the referral agency for indigents where Herman found them.

Taylor, 31, said he has been living on the streets since he got out of jail last month on a drunk-driving charge.

“I lost my home, my job, everything, because of that,” he said. “They make me serve time in jail. Then they let me out. But they didn’t care whether I had a place to live or not.”

Although he has a part-time job at a hot dog stand, Taylor said he only earns $3.50 an hour, which is not enough to find a place to live.

“Besides,” he said, “I’m still paying off the $750 they fined me for the drunk-driving charge.”

Brancato, 20, said he has been homeless for about eight months, ever since his parents kicked him out of his Tarzana home because they caught him using drugs.

He pulled a fading newspaper clipping out of his wallet. The article told how he and two others were arrested last June on suspicion of trespassing when police raided a “tent city” where they and several others had been living near the Van Nuys Boulevard off-ramp of the Ventura Freeway.

‘Hit Bottom’

“Once you hit bottom,” he said, “nobody wants to help you.”

Brancato said he has no hope of finding a job because “you can’t go to work wearing the same old dirty clothes” every day.

“I am trying to get in a drug rehabilitation program, but I can’t find one,” he said.

The two men and others helped themselves to whatever fit them from a pile of clothes the sponsors of the dinner had collected for the homeless.

“The food won’t go to waste,” one woman said. “We’ll give whatever is left to the Salvation Army tomorrow.”

Fanda Bender of the Friends of Homeless Women and Children said she was disappointed to see few women among those who showed up for the dinner. Bender’s group and the church will open a daytime drop-in center for women and their children Dec. 3 in a building being refurbished on the church grounds.

“You see,” she said, “women stay hidden more than the men do. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”