COUNTYWIDE : Free Food Line Back in Business

Eight years ago, Ed Blackney was sitting in W.O. Hart Park in Orange when he heard a woman with a distinctive Irish brogue first call out for the park’s homeless to line up for a warm meal and a kind word.

The woman, Mary McAnena, would become a familiar fixture at the park, where her privately run charity, known as “Mary’s Kitchen,” would feed as many as 200 needy people each day, five days a week. But pressure from park area residents, upset over crime, sent McAnena, 90, searching for a new home for her operation.

Blackney, now 62, was again in line Monday when McAnena opened the newest home for her food line, a converted office trailer in an industrial area about three miles from the park.

The trailer, near the intersection of Struck Avenue and Batavia Street in Orange, is a temporary home for the food line while the search continues for a permanent site.

Although Blackney said he was glad to see McAnena’s charity survive the protest of neighbors, he admitted that he would rather not be a repeat customer.

“I’ve probably missed eight meals since she’s been doing this,” he said as he dined on spaghetti and garlic bread. “I was there that first day. I’d rather not be here; I’d rather be somewhere else. But I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Only seven people lined up Monday for McAnena’s food, a small group that her volunteer staff attributed to the new location and the regular dip in demand at the beginning of each month when welfare checks arrive.

With bilingual signs and maps with the new address posted at Hart Park, McAnena said she also expects word of mouth to draw the crowds in the upcoming days.

“They’ll be here,” said McAnena, a native of Ireland who came to the United States in 1922 to become a nurse.

“There are so many people who have need, so many people who have to sleep under a tree because they don’t have a home, that we will always be busy.”

“Everybody should be busy helping them, even if they can only do a little,” McAnena said.

The new site, which includes a restaurant-size oven donated by Chapman University, was found through the efforts of a task force formed by the Orange City Council to find McAnena a site away from a residential area.

Scott Mather, a member of the task force, said that the trailer will house the program for one year while the search continues for a permanent location.

The city’s Redevelopment Agency set aside $50,000 for the operation’s setup, and some city equipment, such as 25 picnic tables, will be returned when the kitchen finds a permanent home, Mather said.

The trailer, at 517 W. Struck Ave., is within the city’s Corporation Yard, where heavy maintenance vehicles are kept.

Last July, the City Council adopted an ordinance requiring permits for large groups using city parks and capping the amount of time spent at a park, restrictions that effectively forced McAnena’s operations out of Hart Park.

Residents near the park lobbied for the ordinance, which they said would spare them from what they described as legions of small-time criminals and drug users who were attracted by the free lunch.

For McAnena, the location is far less important than the vocation, as long as help is given to those down on their luck.

“I was walking through (Hart Park) eight years ago on the way to church, and I saw a woman--a woman with two children--lying on the ground, which was all covered with dew,” McAnena said. “She had a cover, and it had a hole in it. I said to myself right then, ‘This is my ministry.’ ”

“I can’t believe we are here, in the greatest country in world, and people are hungry and homeless,” she said. “There’s no excuse for it. None.”