Operation Cookie Crumbles Under Deluge of Good Will

Two women who baked cookies for troops stationed in the Persian Gulf are fuming because the sweets ended up in California homeless shelters.

Gina Root and Deborah Lien of Corvallis spent about $75 to send 150 pounds of cookies about three weeks ago to Stephen Butler in La Mesa. The women thought the cookies would soon be on a flight to the gulf.

This week, Root received a letter from a volunteer in a homeless shelter in La Mesa thanking her for the donation.

“I’m furious,” Root said Thursday. “These cookies are for our service people, not for the homeless in California. It just stinks.”

Butler said he distributed the cookies to homeless shelters because he was deluged with treats for the troops and never intended to become the national organizer of Operation Cookie.

He said he volunteered to organize the local Los Angeles cookie effort, but was overwhelmed by cookie donations after a story appeared in newspapers across the country.

For weeks, his living room has been full of cookies.

Root said that, if Butler had more cookies than he could handle, he should have refused to accept shipment.

Butler said he “scrounged” to find a way to get the cookies overseas. He said military planes take the cookies only on a space-available basis, and most flights have been full.

“It was either give them to homeless shelters or throw them in the trash,” Butler said.

He said he thought the honorable thing to do was to give the cookies to shelters.

“I’ve been deluged by angry old ladies giving me tons of suggestions of what I should have done with the cookies,” he said. “From now on, I’ll just let them spoil or throw them away. I’m fed up with it.”