A Close-up Look At People Who Matter : Food Program Founder Serves Up Hash, Hope

Verna Porter has lived every one of her nearly 75 years in Panorama City.

She’s seen the orchards and farms of the San Fernando Valley inexorably fill with people, buildings and cars, but one thing is just as it was when she was a young girl.

“There have always been street people,” said Porter, who founded and runs the 15-year-old Breakfast Program for the Homeless People at the Sepulveda United Methodist Church on Rayen Street in Sepulveda.

“Back in the ‘20s there were the hobos coming out of the Pacoima wash. I remember my mother feeding them at the back door.”

Porter says she never went hungry, even during the Depression. The fruit and walnut ranch owned by her father, the late James Frachtling, also had a vegetable garden and 5,000 chickens.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” she says proudly. “Grew up here, got married here, raised my kids here.”

But it wasn’t until after her six children were grown and gone that Porter noticed the plight of the modern-day street people.

“I saw all these people sleeping in the bushes and feeding themselves out of garbage cans,” she recalls.

In 1982, in an effort to relieve some of the suffering she witnessed, Porter asked the Rev. Edward McRae, then pastor of Sepulveda United Methodist Church, if she could run a soup kitchen out of the church.

McRae agreed. Using donations from individuals and the church, Porter got the program under way.

The soup kitchen eventually gave way to a breakfast program that serves between 100 and 150 people every Monday and Wednesday morning. And now that the program has won a $5,000 Community Partnership Award from The Los Angeles Times, Porter said plans are afoot to add a third weekly breakfast on Fridays.

Porter and the 25 other volunteers, virtually all from the Valley, who help administer the program also provide the homeless with food they can take with them for meals later in the day as well as clothing and shoes from the church thrift store.

“They got a shower we can use,” explained a man named Thomas who has been homeless for the past six years. “There’s a supply of towels, soap, shampoo and razors too.”

But it’s the breakfast program that Porter is particularly proud of.

“We do good breakfast,” she said.

Another homeless man, 52-year-old Jim Raia, has come to the church for the past two years and says the breakfasts of orange juice, coffee, hash and eggs, French toast and sausage, biscuits and gravy or pancakes and bacon have, for him, “probably been the difference between life and death.”

“Verna’s a great lady; she’s got a lot of heart,” says Raia, a 15-year veteran of the streets. “She treats everybody the same. I don’t think she knows how to say no.”

Porter says she’s all too aware that many homeless people have mental illnesses or emotional problems that often account for their inability to find or keep a job, hold a family together or otherwise manage their lives.

Others, she says, are just hard-luck cases caught in a downward spiral.

Her voice trails off and her eyes grow a little distant.

“To me, this program is only a Band-Aid,” Porter says, suddenly animated again. “But the young ones we work on real hard. You’ve got to change the kids. Adults are set in their ways, but you’ve got to show the kids there’s a different way of life than the one they’re living.”

To that end, Porter hopes to use some of the money from The Times award to add a supervised study hall with tutoring programs in math and reading for homeless kids.

To make it happen, however, more volunteers are needed, Porter said.

“We can always use new help,” Porter said. “Some of us are getting old and I wear some of them out so we’d like to get more young bodies.”

Anyone interested in helping Porter and the other volunteers should call the Breakfast Program at (818) 892-1164.

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