. . . Right Touch

Anna, Ill. (pop. 5,408), is neither the nation’s poorest community nor its most prosperous. Located in the southernmost part of the state on the edge of the Shawnee National Forest, Anna’s main business is providing services to nearby farmers. Like many such small towns, it has felt the pain of the agricultural recession. Right now its unemployment rate is close to 20%. People in Anna, though, have concerns that reach well beyond their local economy. One of those concerns has to do with the plight of the homeless in Los Angeles, 1,700 miles away.

Last November, some members of the Anna Heights Baptist Church Brotherhood saw a TV program about the activities of the Fred Jordan Mission in downtown Los Angeles. On Thanksgiving Day the mission, as it does on other occasions during the year, offers full holiday meals to the homeless and hungry. On Thanksgiving it fed close to 7,000. But the program that the people in Anna saw also talked about the discomforts faced by the homeless even in Southern California’s comparatively mild winter. People in Anna know all about winter and about cold. When we talked to the editor of the Anna Gazette-Democrat the other day, he told us that the temperature was 15 degrees and that the town was having a rather nasty ice storm. We have few ice storms in Los Angeles. But we do have a lot of homeless, and the church brotherhood decided that it wanted to help them.

They have. Not long ago a 42-foot semi-trailer truck loaded with tons of warm clothing and blankets pulled up to the Fred Jordan Mission. The brotherhood had collected these donations from people in southern Illinois, southeast Missouri and western Kentucky, and paid for transporting them to Los Angeles. The mission has already distributed this bounty to needy men, women and children. The formidable project was launched because some people in Anna, which has troubles of its own, were touched by what they saw of the troubles of others. A lot of Southern Californians in turn will be touched by what the good people in Anna accomplished.