Selfless ‘Brother’s’ Death Mourned : Community: He called himself ‘Brother Michael’ and he had dedicated his life and all his possessions to helping the poor and the hungry.

Thirty years ago, Michael Charles Dwaileebe became a “born-again” Christian. He sold about $500,000 worth of Orange County real estate, started calling himself “Brother Michael” and founded a one-man mission to feed the hungry. When he died Friday at 80, his only possessions were a burial plot, a $1,000 insurance policy to pay for his funeral, and a white delivery truck bearing the name “Jesus.”

But friends, co-workers and family members who gathered at his funeral Tuesday said the feisty true believer bequeathed them a legacy of inspiration in selflessness. About 300 people, including the well-off and the needy, jammed the South Coast Christian Church in Costa Mesa to share stories in Spanish and English about Dwaileebe--known to everyone, including his family, as “Brother Michael.”

Maria Luis, a volunteer with Brother Michael’s Christian Mission, broke down as she recalled the day she met him eight years ago when she needed food. “He gave me $10 and said, ‘Please serve yourself and take all you want.’ ” Raised in orphanages, she said she looked on Dwaileebe as a father.

His grandson, John Luce, told the crowd, “You were as much his family as I was.”

Dwaileebe rose at 5:30 every morning to collect food to distribute to hundreds of needy people six mornings a week in the parking lot of the South Coast Christian Church.

Many were families with children, said Merle Hattleberg, cook at the church soup kitchen. “He gave so much food to them so they could (spend what money they had) on their rent and have bus money to come to and from work. Now that will be a hardship on those families,” she said. “There’s nobody could fill those shoes.”

The son of Lebanese immigrants, Dwaileebe was born in 1909 in Pennsylvania and lived in Olean, N.Y., until moving to California in 1935 to seek his fortune as a songwriter. During the Depression, he became a house painter to support his wife, from whom he was later divorced, and two children. He moved to Costa Mesa and became a real estate broker, buying several parcels around what is today Hoag Hospital.

When he was 50, he became a independent fundamentalist Christian, although he had little regard for religious strictures and was not a regular churchgoer, said his daughter Donna Dwaileebe, a family therapist in Tustin.

After the Watts riots, he took toys to children in South-Central Los Angeles and biblical tracts to their parents. Twenty years ago, he started to buy and distribute food to the needy. “The Bible said sell all you have and give it to the poor. I did it and I believe it,” he once told a Times reporter.

He painted houses to support his mission and lived in a sparsely furnished apartment. He rejected any personal gifts, said his daughter. “At Christmas, I gave him a whole bunch of $5 gift certificates to restaurants. He gave it all away. It got so we’d just give him checks for his mission.”

She said Dwaileebe didn’t believe in doctors and rarely saw one for any of the 37 heart attacks he suffered in the past five years. “He’d be flattened, out working on the back of a truck and zapped. Out. Then the next day, he’d be out there (working) again.”

He realized he was going to die, she said, and spent the last two months praying for death, cleaning up his bills and writing notes to donors, thanking them.

“It is my wish,” the letter said, “that any gift you may have given to my ministry for Christ, be sent instead to SOS, Share Our Selves (a private shelter for the needy in Costa Mesa). . . . Please be happy with me because I am now with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ where there is no poverty. . . .”

He died of a heart attack at his apartment, after distribution of food for the day. Burial will take place at Pacific View Memorial Cemetery in Corona del Mar.

Donna Dwaileebe said her father’s descendants never begrudged his decision to liquidate his fortune and give it to charity. “The gifts he’s given me are spiritual gifts, the gifts that are truly important--pride in work, independence, thinking for myself. But always helping other people and doing good work. Those old-fashioned values.”