He’s at Home Battling Hunger on the Streets : Skid Row: Ray Castellani troubles some social-service officials with his curbside handouts.

Ray Castellani’s pickup trucks pulled up with their cargoes of free food at 5th and San Pedro streets, the guts of Skid Row.

And commotion followed.

Dozens of street people swarmed a young woman volunteer handing out meal tickets. Cursing, scuffling, laughing, they struggled for the tickets, pushing the woman against one of the two trucks. It looked as if someone might get hurt.

At the center of the crowd, however, 58-year-old Ray Castellani moved with impunity: People hugged him and called his name. Several homeless men moved in to help him calm the others, a kind of spontaneous security force.

“They take kindness for weakness down here, man,” said a muscular man with a bandaged hand and radio headphones around his neck. “But they all love Ray.”

It has been four years since Castellani, a former actor who has survived bouts of alcoholism and homelessness, first hit the downtown streets, dispensing peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches from the tailgate of a pickup truck. It has been 14 months since the truck, which he occasionally lived in, was stolen.

News reports about the truck theft last year brought a barrage of generosity from celebrities, businesses, a radio station, City Hall. As a result, Castellani has been able to build his one-man Van Nuys charity, Frontline Foundation, into a simple but sizable vehicle for feeding poor people. He has gained many admirers on and off the streets, although a few officials at larger charities downtown feel his good works could be better organized.

Castellani now has two pickup trucks. He recently rented a 1,200-square-foot storage space in an industrial park, where more than 40 volunteers assist him. He makes four trips a week downtown, feeding hundreds of people weekdays and up to 1,000 on Saturdays, and says he recently passed the mark of 200,000 meals served.

After precarious years of housesitting or sleeping in the truck, his possessions scattered at the houses of friends, Castellani just moved into a small apartment in Van Nuys. Because he devotes his full time to the foundation, he pays the rent with financial help from a son who works as a carpenter and with donations, some of them anonymous.

“It’s been phenomenal,” said Castellani, whose craggy face evokes the days when he played villains in TV Westerns and when his personal demons dumped him on more than one Skid Row. “We have a way to get food. We have a way to involve the people of the community.”

Frontline Foundation has a minimal budget, about $4,000, and gets some supplies as purchases or gifts from businesses. Most of the food comes from volunteers who stand outside supermarkets in the San Fernando Valley and ask shoppers to donate a specific item--canned fruit, soup, etc.--on their way out.

“It’s more of a hassle to deal with organizations than to stand in front of a supermarket,” said Noreen Goldner, a 22-year-old UCLA senior who helps run the group. “We don’t ask for money. We ask for a specific item, so they don’t have to think about it. And we invite them downtown to help us.”

Castellani prides himself on the direct approach.

“I’m not out to change these people or rehabilitate them,” he said Tuesday morning as a small convoy of volunteers sped south on the Hollywood Freeway, the office towers of downtown rising in the haze. “I just want to feed them.”

That attitude troubles officials at some social service agencies that provide food, shelter and counseling programs to the poor.

Maxene Johnston, president of the multi-service Weingart Center for the homeless, said it is hard to criticize Castellani’s intentions. But she and others are disturbed by the tumult and litter she said his sidewalk operation produces.

“It creates a feeding frenzy,” she said. “It creates a safety problem. It draws attention to the most dysfunctional members of the homeless population. There has to be a better way.”

Johnston and others also have a philosophical disagreement with Castellani and with others--individuals and church groups--who show up more sporadically to hand out food in an area where there are numerous agencies serving meals.

“I don’t see any problem with being generous and handing out food,” said Sam Bettencourt, an administrator at the Fred Jordan Mission, which he said requires homeless to attend religious services before meals. “But food is one of the things they are not most in need of. They go from one mission to another. We prefer that people would donate food to organizations feeding the homeless. We’re the professionals, we’re working down here.”

To what extent is it valuable to give out free meals, Johnston said, without also trying to involve people in a program to help them become self-sufficient--such as treatment for drug and alcohol problems or job counseling?

“In life there are usually strings attached,” she said. “People have to work, to do something, for a meal.”

Additionally, Castellani has had complaints because his food line temporarily blocks the driveway to the parking lot of a building housing offices of the Los Angeles Mission. After an official talked to him about the problem last week, Castellani agreed to keep the driveway clear.

Castellani dismisses the criticism. He said his volunteers take pains to keep the street clean and orderly. He said he is responding to “desperateness” as best he can.

“I am focused into the purity of giving for the sake of giving,” he said. “The people on the street aren’t going to knock me.”

People on the street said Castellani is beloved because he gives without conditions, unlike organizations that require them to participate in religious activities, for example.

“One thing about downtown, man, ain’t no problem eating,” said Andre, a bearded 33-year-old. “But at the missions you have to hear a sermon first. The missions, it’s strictly a business thing, and they play the role like it’s religious. Ray does it from the heart.”

When Castellani emerged from the car into the crowd of homeless people Tuesday morning, he was greeted by Nathan, a parolee in a brimmed cap with the word champagne tattooed on his forearm. Nathan clasped Castellani’s hand, said he was living on the street after his release from prison and asked Castellani if he could get him a pair of socks.

“Remember me, Ray?” Nathan said. “Don’t forget me next time, Ray.”

Those lined up for ravioli, corn dogs, fruit juice, coffee and doughnuts included two blond boys, ages 3 and 4, and their parents. The boys ran among big ragged men eating off paper plates; the men patted their heads, hugged them, pressed doughnuts into their hands.

“Everybody down here knows these two boys,” said the father, who identified himself as Thomas.

He said the family survives on the money he makes at a temporary-labor agency and lives, somewhat warily, in a transient hotel where a man was recently thrown out a window to his death. They came downtown from the Torrance area five months ago when Thomas was unable to find work as a landscaper and got his wife and children into a women’s shelter.

“Things just got bad,” Thomas said.

Castellani feels deeply for the down-and-out because of his past hardships, Goldner, the UCLA volunteer, said. “I think he’s on a mission,” she said. “He tries to do everything with love.”

The mission grows out of years of desperation. Castellani grew up in New York and studied drama, then found work in Hollywood playing villainous TV gunslingers in the 1950s and 1960s. A persistent, longtime drinking problem gradually destroyed his career and family and introduced him to the Skid Rows of several cities, he said.

“By 1966, I remember standing outside 20th Century-Fox and not remembering what show I was in, much less what my lines were,” he said.

He spent the following three years drifting in and out of homelessness. He eventually got sober and found occasional acting jobs again.

But the street never seemed far away. Castellani felt compelled to go back and do something.

Frontline Foundation has grown considerably in four years. The ranks of the volunteers include Skid Row residents who come to Van Nuys to help prepare meals. And organizers have plans to expand further.

While keeping his base in the Valley where donations are plentiful, Castellani is trying to set up a “substation” downtown, a storefront space where he could truck in supplies continually and cut down on some of the current confusion. His goal is to serve 1,500 meals a day, every day.

After several homeless men raked up debris and shoveled it into garbage bags Tuesday morning, Castellani got back in the car and headed for the freeway. He stopped several times to say hello to people standing or lying against walls.

“When I go to Skid Row and sit on the corner,” Castellani said, “I know the street is dirty. But I feel clean.”

THE FILM FACES OF RAY CASTELLANI

The former actor may be familiar to viewers of TV Westerns. From left, he is seen as he appeared in roles during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Castellani grew up in New York and studied drama, then found work in Hollywood playing villainous TV gunslingers. A drinking problem gradually destroyed his career: “I remember standing outside 20th Century Fox and not remembering what show I was in, much less what my lines were,” he said. He eventually got sober, finding occasional acting jobs again in the ‘70s.