Warm Heart, Hot Soup Let the Homeless Know That Someone Does Care

On the first day Merle Hatleberg opened her soup kitchen in Costa Mesa--with her own money, her own pot, her own stove and her own recipe for vegetable beef soup--25 people lined up at the door.

That was just two years ago--before the Lion’s Club started giving her money raised at its annual fish fry and before word got out that there was a place to donate food and clothing that would be put to good use.

Now, Hatleberg’s Someone Cares Soup Kitchen at Rea Community Center feeds up to 150 of the county’s hungry each weekday. It is staffed entirely by volunteers and is one of the few soup kitchens in Orange County open five days a week.

“Sometimes the City Council takes heat because of the soup kitchen operation,” Costa Mesa City Councilman David Wheeler said. “Neighbors feel that it doesn’t attract the right kind of people to the area, but many of the people served by her kitchen . . . wouldn’t eat if it weren’t for her work.”

Hatleberg, who has spent a lifetime feeding people, welcomes everyone except the alcoholics who insist on drinking during lunch. After a few warnings, she turns them out. But more often than not, when she sees them with nothing to eat, she sneaks a few bowls out the back door for them.

Hatleberg said she puts in 12 hours a day running the soup kitchen and the senior center next door. She said that at 65, and with all eight of her children grown, she has to fill up her time somehow.

Besides, Hatleberg said, she knows all too well how hard life can get. About 25 years ago, her alcoholic husband abandoned her, leaving her with six children and no money.

“He drank up a home in Fullerton--a big five-bedroom house with a pool,” she said. “I just started all over again.”

With no job experience and no college degree, Hatleberg said, she turned to the only type of work that paid enough to support her children.

“The only paying job was a waitress, and I had to make a lot of money,” she said. “I made a lot of money. I was good.”

She worked nights so she could spend the days with her children--”get them off to school and get them to their Scout meetings”--and did what she could to be both mother and father. When her son joined the Future Farmers of America, she took him to the annual father-son banquet, where, she said with a rueful grin, “I was the only mom.”

When her youngest was almost finished with high school, Hatleberg decided to return to college. By then she was 50. Taking classes at night, she worked full time at a convalescent home during the day. Her major, aptly enough, was hotel and restaurant management.

When she graduated, she got a job catering at Anaheim Stadium, where she stayed until an injury forced her to leave. “The doctor, he told me to go home and draw my disability. I had done my time.

“I said, ‘Uh-uh.’ ”

Hatleberg didn’t need much money to live on, and she had been wanting to get into social service work for a long time. So when she was offered a modest-paying job as director of the Transportation, Lunch and Counseling Senior Center in the Rea center, she took it.

“It just sounded like exactly what I was looking for,” she said. “I could be close to food, but I could have a sit-down job and I could still do a lot of community service, which I love to do.”

It was there that she got the idea to open her soup kitchen.

For about a year, Hatleberg said, she had been loaning can openers and spoons to people leaving the nearby Share Our Selves, an emergency services program for the homeless. SOS has no kitchen, and the best it could do for the hungry people who turned up daily was give them canned food.

But the sight of them wolfing down cold pork and beans in back of the Rea center became too much for Merle, so she drew up a proposal for a hot lunch program.

“They just looked like they needed a good bowl of soup,” she explained. “A good bowl of Merle’s soup.”

After a monthlong battle with the Costa Mesa City Council, which was under pressure from residents who didn’t want the operation in their neighborhood, she won permission to open up her soup kitchen in the city-owned center.

Hatleberg said the neighbors now more or less accept her presence there. But she is the first to admit that the acceptance hasn’t come easily. “They know it’s needed, but no one wants it in their neighborhood,” she said.

Hatleberg said she figures it costs her about $35 for each day’s pot of soup. She regularly gets donations of food, clothing, dry goods, and money from individuals and local businesses, as well as grants from foundations and government agencies.

Now, what she would like to see more than anything else, she said, is a shelter for single homeless men in Costa Mesa.

If they can’t find shelter for the night and a place to shower so they can look for jobs, Hatleberg said, the least she can do is give them a bowl of soup.

“No one should have to go to bed hungry,” she said. “There’s plenty out here.”