Sister Dorothy’s Traveling Kitchen : Armed With Home Cooking and Common Sense, She Brings Her Street Ministry to the Homeless

Sister Dorothy emerges from a blue pickup truck filled with home cooking: spaghetti, beans and rice, and 161 foam plastic cups containing Evelyn Roux’s tasty potato salad. A feast--the good Lord willing--is about to be served at City Hall.

“Well, what do you think, Lord?” Sister Dorothy says out loud, her eyes cast heavenward as several homeless people gather around.

Soon, members from the West Angeles Church of God in Christ arrive. Quickly, a folding table is loaded with hot food, bread and pastries. A few yards away, water will be served.

Bibles are opened. Volunteers grip ladles. And more than 200 men, women and children spring to their feet from makeshift cardboard beds, from behind tree trunks, bushes and walls to join in saying grace.

Sister Dorothy’s street kitchen is open; an angel has come to City Hall Plaza to feed the hungry.

On this particular Sunday--like every Sunday for the last six years--Dorothy Johnson Taylor has been up since 5 a.m., going over a list of things to do and praying there will be enough food.

Before attending a 7 a.m. sermon, she will arrive at her office at the Crenshaw-area church and wait for a potato salad delivery from a church cook. Then she will wrap more than 100 cinnamon rolls with plastic. After the service, she will load more than 50 pounds of peaches and apples into boxes, wrap a few hundred doughnuts and make room in a refrigerator for a 10-gallon tray of spaghetti that has been dropped off by another cook on her way to work.

By 9:30 several volunteers have shown up to load the pickup and take care of last-minute preparations. Everyone except Tony Guinn and Karen P. Brand--who attended church earlier--are off to the next sermon and promise to meet Taylor at City Hall to serve and preach the Gospel at 11:30.

With Guinn behind the pickup’s wheel, Taylor, 59, begins her mission.

Before her final stop at City Hall, Taylor and the two volunteers make their usual stops at three Skid Row street corners to feed the hungry, many who haven’t eaten in days. Most at the first stop are expecting her.

They know her face.

They’ve heard her prayers.

They’ve tasted her home cooking.

“I’m hungry today, Sister,” says a man in a tattered overcoat and shoes so worn that they reveal his toes.

“I know you are, sweetheart,” Taylor says as she offers him a tuna sandwich, peach and sweet roll. “Thank you Jesus for this sandwich,” she says to a woman near tears at the generosity.

She asks a family that includes two children sharing a stroller not to leave after they have received their food. Taylor leans into the truck and pulls out a two-layer chocolate cake, wrapped in plastic. The children’s eyes light up as Taylor places the cake, extra bread loaves and sandwiches in the stroller.

“Gracias, senora,” the father says.

In 1986, Taylor started her church’s Skid Row Ministry program that feeds the hungry and preaches the Gospel to the homeless.

During the week, she asks grocers to donate food and the congregation to donate money. On Sunday mornings, volunteers cook and prepare food that Taylor had stored throughout the week in four freezers and two refrigerators at a church office.

Her interest in feeding the homeless began with her 82-year-old mother, Sarah Johnson. For years Johnson rode the bus downtown to minister to the homeless on Sunday mornings. Taylor, a part-time nurse at Los Angeles’ Midway Hospital, often accompanied her.

“She instilled in me a deep compassion and commitment to the less fortunate,” Taylor says.

When her mother, because of the infirmities of old age, stopped making her Skid Row visits, Taylor picked up the slack. She also brought along her home cooking: turkey wings, pies and cupcakes. Soon, with the help of church members and cooks Mattie Adams and Sonja Robinson, the Skid Row Ministry program was born.

“Every time I see food thrown away, it breaks my heart,” Taylor says. “I think, ‘Now that’s food that some hungry child could be eating.’ ”

As a young girl in Beaumont, Tex., she says her mother always “made us eat everything on our plates. We never threw food away.”

Taylor says there may have been times there was little to eat, but she never went to bed hungry: “I’ve never known what it’s like to be hungry. I’ve never been without food. And that’s why I do this. These people are hungry and they need it. My heart goes out to them. It makes me cry.”

She says that the Skid Row rounds she made with her mother also exposed her to the way the homeless live on the streets. It’s something, Taylor says, that her volunteers also have experienced “and have been better people for it. They see the need for the work we do.”

Since that time, she has witnessed life in its rawest state: drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally infirm and some just down on their luck. Taylor has fed them. And prayed for them.

“I have seen the despair in their faces and the chaos around them,” she says.

At another stop on the way to City Hall, Taylor, Guinn and Brand--who is following in her own car--are surrounded by homeless men, several whose greed turns to anger.

Taylor is in hard-core Skid Row. Men with tattoos on their necks crawl out of refrigerator-size cardboard boxes. Many don’t want the food. They’d rather have drugs, one suggests. A few others become belligerent because they get but one sandwich. They don’t want doughnuts, either. They’d rather have the bags of cookies, which had already been handed out.

“Now, now,” says Taylor, coming face to face with a man twice her size. “Thank God for what we’ve got.” The man mumbles a few obscenities and insists on more food even though he has already received his share. Taylor explains there are at least 50 others waiting for a sandwich. But the man insists on more.

Guinn steps in.

“Look sir, please don’t do that,” he says, coming between Taylor and the man. “You don’t have to be treating her like that. This woman deserves your respect, sir. Please.”

The man backs off and walks away. Taylor reaches into a box and follows with an extra sandwich. The next few men in line also want more and reach into the truck, some making off with food set aside for City Hall. Shouting erupts.

“Get in the truck, Tony,” Taylor says. “Get in your car, Karen. Hurry up now,” she says calmly. “I’ll catch up,” she says, tightening the scarf around her head. The two drive off and idle their vehicles a block away. Taylor continues her stride to the pickup while trying to soothe the tempers around her.

“Some people are very grateful and others are not,” she says, once inside the pickup truck. Taylor says this stop wasn’t that bad. She and her crusaders have endured worse because “the Lord does not want us to be shy. He wants us to be bold.”

That’s why, Taylor says, her ministry has grown.

Certainly, there is more of everything. Through word of mouth and public awareness, more food has been donated, more church members have shown up to help on Sundays, more prayers have been said.

Unfortunately there are also more hungry people, as evidenced by the crowd at City Hall Plaza.

“Now we want to come back next Sunday,” Taylor announces. “But if you want us to return, you’ve got throw away your trash in these boxes. This is City Hall. We must keep it clean if you want us to come back.”

Yes, Sister, they will, says a bearded man in line. “Won’t we!” he demands to those near him, who in turn promise that they won’t litter, argue or be disrespectful. The message reverberates down the line.

Genevieve Medas, who has worked as a cook and server for the last four years, says the ministry would be nonexistent without Sister Dorothy.

“She opens her heart to these people. She doesn’t like to know that someone is hungry,” Medas says. “Last Christmas she was down with the flu, and her doctors told her to stay at home. But she was out here pushing and pushing and pushing.”

If she didn’t push, Taylor says, they wouldn’t have fed more than 1,000 people on this day:

“The day that I come back with food is the day that I stop coming.”