In the Spirit of the Season : 2 Unlikely Santas Serve Dinner With Love

Susan Silbert is too old to believe in Santa Claus and Jack Berlin is too clean-shaven to look like Santa Claus, but there they were last week, standing on a downtown Los Angeles loading dock that might as well have been the North Pole.

Berlin, owner of a thriving produce company in the Wholesale Produce Market, was providing the goodies, $15,000 to $20,000 worth of donated potatoes, apples, onions, carrots and beans.

Silbert, founder of a small organization that raises money to buy clothing and food for poor people, was getting ready to hop in her car and follow two huge trucks from the loading dock to a vacant supermarket, where she and hundreds of fellow volunteers would prepare more than 2,000 elaborate Christmas dinner boxes.

It was a nice little holiday moment. But then there have been a lot of nice moments in the five years since Silbert’s ferocious idealism connected with Berlin’s generosity.

Sociology Teacher

In 1981, Silbert, a sociology teacher who has taught at several Southland colleges, persuaded a dozen students in a racial relations class at California State University, Northridge, to hold a raffle that raised $1,000, enough to put together 70 Christmas dinners.

Through a friend of Berlin’s daughters, Silbert and her students wound up at Berlin’s company, Potato Sales, to buy their produce. They went at 4 in the morning, prime chaos time in the life of a produce mart, but Berlin took care of them.

“We come down with cash in our hands,” said Silbert, still surprised, “and Jack starts calling to people--’Hey, Harry, throw in three bales of carrots.’ He’s down there with us literally grabbing these guys.”

The next December, Silbert organized a larger effort from an evening class that had many adults. They raised enough money to buy and distribute 500 dinners and by the time they were finished, a core of 15 people decided they would stick around. They incorporated as One Voice.

Silbert, teaching part time, ran the organization out of her West Los Angeles home as a year-round emergency aid program, responding to requests from area social workers. She hooked up with a couple of Head Start programs that serve the Central City and the Westside and began routing Christmas dinners to families of Head Start students, all of whom fall below the federal poverty level ($10,989 for a family of four).

Through word of mouth and the enthusiasm of One Voice’s founders, donations increased each year. And every December, Silbert put in a call to Berlin for produce and told him how many dinners she wanted to put together.

“He’d call me back with the price, like $18,000,” Silbert said. “I’d say, ‘I only got $12,000.’ He’d say, ‘Call me tomorrow.’ I call and he says, ‘The price is $11,500.’ And he would never acknowledge it as a donation. Somehow, each year, whatever we had to pay, that was the price. Of all the people we’ve worked with--and we have a lot of donations--I’ve never met anybody like him.”

By this Christmas season, Silbert had a mailing list of about 2,000 donors and was able to plan a budget of $40,000, enough to pay for 2,200 dinners, some ample enough to feed families as large as 10.

This time when she called Berlin, he told her he first wanted to come to her office and talk to her. Silbert panicked. For one thing, she did not have an office, and she worried she might be losing her benevolent supplier.

Berlin, however, had simply become intrigued.

“She’s an absolute tiger,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone so devoted to a cause. That impressed me.”

‘You Have to See’

Joyce Steward, a supervisor of one of the two Head Start operations that receive One Voice’s donations, feels the same way--not simply about the sheer volume of donated food but about the fact that the group’s members show up at the pickup sites to greet the needy recipients and offer to help take the food home. Silbert is proud that volunteers treat Head Start families as “members of the family” and that greetings include a friendly hug.

“They are the only ones who do such a magnificent job,” Steward said. “All of their volunteers get directly involved with the families. It’s something you have to see to believe.”

Silbert, 41, has a doctorate in sociology and a commitment to social change that reflects her years as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s (“I believe learning theory means nothing if you don’t apply it to the world”), but what gives her philosophy an edge is her focus on what she describes as a second kind of poverty.

“People are literally dying for a way to become involved, to care in a significant way,” she said. “I saw in that classroom (five years ago) that people of all ages had a veneer of alienation and apathy, but the veneer was very thin, and that over the course of a 10- or 15-week course that veneer could be broken down, and I found over and over that people wanted to give, wanted a community, wanted honesty. That made me hopeful that there were thousands out there.”

Berlin listened to all this when he drove to Silbert’s house to find out what she was all about.

‘A Nervous Wreck’

“I’m looking at this ramshackle house,” he recalled, speaking in a rapid-fire clip associated with his industry, “and the phones are ringing like crazy, and she’s a nervous wreck and she says, ‘You see what’s going on? I have 15 volunteers. I’m the full-time person. We get paid nothing.’ ”

Berlin asked Silbert what she wanted. Silbert said she wanted to find a way to set up a small office and devote herself permanently to One Voice.

Berlin told her to keep the money she was going to pay him for produce this year. That means that, for the first time, Silbert’s organization will be able to move out of her house and function professionally--all the while, Silbert insists, making sure that 100% of the donations go to purchases for the needy.

Berlin, 59, who grew up in the West Adams section of Los Angeles as the son of a market man (“My father was a buyer; he ran the first stall in Grand Central Market”), talked reluctantly about his donation.

“This industry has been good to me,” he said, “and I don’t think anybody has to be alerted to what the need is. I don’t know if there are more hungry people or if it’s simply more publicized, but it’s the biggest thing around. I get turned off by organizations or hustlers on the phone that have only a percentage going to the cause.”

‘From the Heart’

What turns him on, he explained, are projects that “come from the heart,” like the annual drive put on by the nearby Newton Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose officers deliver Christmas dinners to 500 families. Merchants in the produce market provide the produce and some financial aid.

Sunday at five community centers, the meals that Berlin helped finance and Silbert’s volunteers packed were distributed to families that were selected earlier this month by Head Start counselors.