‘Father Dollar Bill’ : Priest Gives $1, No Sermons, on Skid Row

It’s a long, hot wait on Main Street for a moment with the tall man in the priest’s collar and the bright blue L.A. Rams cap. Then it’s a handshake, “God bless you” and a brand-new dollar from “Father Dollar Bill.”

The money goes for anything from crack cocaine to toothpaste, but Father Maurice Chase, a Roman Catholic priest, said he does not mind how the poorest of the poor spend his charity.

Always dressed in black clerical garb, he attracts a straggly line of hundreds of men and a few women when he arrives at the sidewalk across from the Union Rescue Mission on Sunday afternoons.

Bodyguards give out numbered cards and struggle to keep the line in order as Chase fishes out the bills from his pants pocket. He hands them over with a few questions about health and hometowns.

“I like to think that everybody should have at least a dollar in their pocket, and a lot of these people don’t,” he said.

Chase, the chaplain at Notre Dame Academy, a girls’ school on the Westside, gathers the money from wealthy friends who know that he frequents Skid Row. He names Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck as some of his benefactors, along with Georgia Frontiere, owner of the Rams.

“My heart breaks for the people down here, who are just flotsam,” he said. “It’s kind of a parish to me. . . . I’m not just Santa Claus down here, but I’m someone they love.”

Chase, 59, has been a priest since he was 24. A native of Dinuba, a small town in the San Joaquin Valley, he said he got into fund raising through his friendship with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and especially the President’s wife, Mamie, when he was assigned to a parish in Palm Desert.

He worked for several years as a fund-raiser for Loyola Marymount University. But his personal mission to Skid Row began 14 years ago.

So Many Are Desperate

At first he looked for the neediest cases, he said. But there are so many desperate lives in the bleak blocks of downtown Los Angeles that he gave up and decided to hand out $1 at a time. He has been coming to Skid Row on Sundays for about a year.

Pregnant women and families get larger donations. (“Don’t tell the others,” he whispers to them.)

“It’s a good thing,” said John Williams, originally of Detroit, who lined up behind 450 other men on a recent Sunday to wait his turn for a buck and a blessing. He said he had been living on the streets for a month.

“This way every person can do their own thing. It’s like, optional,” he said.

Others in the line said they would use their dollars for milk, bus fare or orange juice. But “most people, they take the money and go buy some brew or some wine,” said Horace Herndon, a former car salesman who said he has been living on Skid Row for eight months.

“As for me, I’m going to buy a joint of marijuana,” he said. “If I drank, I’d get depressed.”

One man said he would buy a lottery ticket. “Am I ever going to win the lottery?” he asked the priest, who laughed and made the sign of the cross over the dollar to give an extra blessing.

But many were looking forward to a pack of cigarettes.

“They last longer than those other things,” Williams said.

Some Critics

Chase’s $1 handouts draw mixed reactions from the activists who try to help the tattered men and women of Skid Row every day.

They say that a man who gives the invocation at high society dinners (“Lord, from the fear of calories please preserve us,” he said at one dinner, according to a society column), and passes out at least $50,000 a year could do more good by paying for beds in a homeless shelter or by funding a food program.

“He’s not just a simple priest,” said John Dillon, executive director of the Chrysalis Center, a Skid Row self-help agency. “He’s a major player and a major fund-raiser and maybe this is his way of staying in touch with the poor, and maybe that’s good, but where is the money going?”

“He always goes in his church suit,” said Catherine Morris, a member of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker Community, which operates a four-day-a-week lunch line on East 6th Street.

“To me, it’s not what the church ought to be doing,” she said. “It is the moneyed church of Los Angeles passing out money, and that isn’t the church’s role. The church’s role is being a spiritual leader. . . . It just seems like fast money gone quickly, but gone nowhere.”

Dignity’s Blessing

Chase is aware of these doubts. If he could nail down a major donation, he would like to set up a 500-bed shelter. But he argues that the spiritual benefit of a blessing and the personal dignity that comes from having a dollar in your pocket are also worthwhile.

“One of my joys is looking at a face and seeing a face light up,” he said. “If I saved all that money up, it would be a long time before anything came of it. And meanwhile, what about the people who could have a dollar to buy a cold drink on a warm afternoon?”