Serving Homeless Gives Students Food for Thought : Poverty: CSUN sorority and fraternity members are among those who mobilize to feed hundreds of people in downtown L. A. A Canoga Park group is also involved.

James Benson got up at 4:30 a.m. Sunday to help his fraternity buddies at Cal State Northridge load up five pickup trucks with 2,000 eggs, 270 pounds of cornflakes, 300 loaves of bread and more.

The 20-year-old junior wasn’t preparing for a rush party or a hazing for new pledges. He was one of about 100 college students, mostly from sororities and fraternities, who volunteered to make breakfast for the homeless in downtown Los Angeles.

“It doesn’t get much better than this,” Benson said, nodding at the volunteers serving scrambled eggs and hot coffee to a long line of people. “It makes it a lot of fun to think that people are coming together like this.”

The students, with help from Children Are Our Future, a Canoga Park organization that provides homes for abandoned or neglected boys, spent four hours serving food to 785 people at the corner of 4th Street and Towne Avenue. The weekend-before-Thanksgiving benefit was organized for the fourth consecutive year by David Byrne, chairman of philanthropy for Sigma Pi fraternity.

“We do this to kick off the holiday season,” said Byrne, a 37-year-old junior. “We know the mission will feed them on Thursday, but there’s not going to be anyone down here on Sunday.”

Byrne sent out 90 letters and made about 300 phone calls to collect the food, which was donated primarily by local companies and markets. The volunteers loaded the goods--including 150 gallons of milk, 80 pounds of butter and 350 doughnuts--in the early morning hours and arrived downtown by 7 a.m.

Byrne announced the breakfast as he drove through the streets, yelling to people still sleeping on the sidewalks of the industrial area while other volunteers set up a makeshift kitchen on the sidewalk.

Cooks took their places behind more than a dozen eight-foot-long card tables, some of them scooping cornflakes out of a three-foot-high box, others starting the coffee makers run by portable generators.

Benson spent the morning buttering bread and picking up trash. Nearby, sophomore Bridgette Plueger, 21, stirred skillet after skillet of scrambled eggs on a Coleman stove--often under the close supervision of people waiting anxiously for the food.

“That’s good enough for me,” one man said as he looked at the nearly done eggs and tipped his paper plate toward her.

“Whatever you guys say,” Plueger said, scooping a spoonful onto the plate.

Betty Black, 35, had breakfast and then loaded eggs and cornflakes into a box to take home to her three children. Black, who lives in a residential hotel, said the food would help the family make it through the month.

“I get food stamps and welfare, but it don’t last a whole month,” she said.

William Faulk, 30, said the breakfast was a nice surprise after spending the night sleeping on the street because the missions were full.

“I had me a bowl of cereal and I don’t know how many plates of eggs and bread and butter,” Faulk said, patting his stomach as he sat relaxing in the middle of the deserted street. “I really just pigged out this morning and I enjoyed it. I wish they’d come back.”

Faulk said he has lived on the streets for five years after he lost his job in a hospital, where he was an aide for the developmentally disabled. “It shows some people understand about the conditions,” Faulk said of the breakfast.

Some students said the experience made them feel guilty about their own lives.

“When I think of the homeless, I think of 30- or 40-year-olds,” said Kerri Legg, 20. “You don’t think of the kids who are 8 or 10 down here. It makes me feel selfish that I have all that I do.”

Some of the students said they wished that they could do more.

John Carolan, 21, president of Sigma Pi, said meeting the people attending the breakfast opened his eyes last year to the plight of the homeless. This year, he said, he paid people to wash his car and bought a telephone-wire bracelet made by a homeless man.

“It’s like you want to help them,” he said. “But what can you do?”