Covered by Blanket Policy : Anaheim Hills Man Helps Homeless Stay Warm in Private Crusade

Raymond Fico still remembers the night seven years ago when a group of dusty, shivering homeless men ambled forward to meet his van as he steered it past litter-strewn camps near a wooded park area of Santa Ana.

Recognizing Fico, one of the men turned and yelled toward the tree line: “The Blanket Man is here!” In moments, Fico said, a stream of men, women and children were making their way through the chilly night air and lining up behind the blue van packed with stacks of blankets.

“We gave away about 50 blankets, and as I watched all these people go back down into the woods, I could see the different color blankets through the trees,” said Fico, 73, who has given away more than 250,000 blankets during an eight-year private crusade to help the homeless.

Those images from that night in early 1986, when he saw what seemed to be dancing flashes of color in the woods, have remained with the Anaheim Hills resident.

“I saw that and it seemed to me to be the greatest gift you could give,” he said. “Not to them, but to me. God’s gift to me.”

It is a gift that Fico discovered just before Christmas, 1985, when a televised report showing huddled homeless people sleeping on the streets convinced him that he could not enjoy his holiday while others went cold.

He and his wife, Sarah, instead decided to forgo gifts and buy blankets to hand out to the needy. From that start--250 cotton and polyester blankets distributed in Santa Ana and Los Angeles--began a campaign that launched the retired minister’s nonprofit company, Covering Wings.

With the help of his stepson, Los Angeles minister John Contreras, the soft-spoken Fico has quietly turned Covering Wings into a nationwide distributor of inexpensive blankets and unused clothes for the disadvantaged. The linchpin of their effort is a space-age survival blanket that is as versatile as it is cost-efficient.

“I got the idea from the blankets the astronauts took into space,” Fico said as he modeled the latest design of the shiny silver polyurethane tarpaulin, which has a hood and snaps so it can double as a poncho. With eyelets that also allow it to be used as a tent, the blanket is perfect for street survival, Fico said. Made by a company in Taiwan using Fico’s design, the blankets cost $2.50 apiece to produce, he said.

“We used to give out the regular blankets, but we found out that those were gone and useless the first time the rain came,” Fico said. Standing in the middle of Covering Wings’ modest storefront headquarters in Huntington Beach, he pointed to stacked boxes packed with the glossy material. “But these, these last.”

The popularity of the 5-foot-by-7-foot blankets in Southern California soon spurred Covering Wings to expand its operations, which are funded primarily through private donations. Now, with more than 100 distribution programs, the survival tarps reach the homeless in more than a dozen states.

Thousands of blankets have also been sent to Europe, reaching the needy in the Czech Republic, England and Russia, and plans are underway for shipments to Africa. Closer to home, the blanket-parkas were ubiquitous in flood-ravaged parts of Mexico earlier this year, said Ofelia Gomez deLugo, director of a government aid program based in Tijuana.

“Just the group I was with handed out hundreds of them to the people--who had no beds and no place--to keep them from the cold ground,” she said. “The people had lost everything, so it helped a lot.”

Fico said it is startling to survey how far his modest Christmas goodwill gesture has come.

“I had no idea it would get like this,” Fico said. “No idea at all. I was supposed to retire. We had bought a brand-new van and a trailer so my wife and I could see the country, and then this all started. That trailer hasn’t moved.”

While the far-flung impacts of his crusade delight Fico, he finds the greatest rewards in his monthly visits to impoverished areas of Orange and Los Angeles counties. The one-on-one interaction as he hands out the survival blankets and assorted clothes, he said, reminds him of his mission.

As Fico set up shop at Garden Grove’s Pioneer Park on Sunday, 50 anxious people were queued up.

“Wait, not yet, we have to unload everything,” Fico told the crowd from his perch atop a park bench. As volunteers carried boxes piled high with donated socks and children’s clothes out of the van with the license plate COVER US, Fico waved to some familiar faces in the crowd.

One first-time visitor was Emily Lattimer, 32, a mother of six who came to the park seeking the weekly free meal program.

“These clothes will help, they’ll help a lot,” Lattimer said.

Rocky Brooks, a 36-year-old veteran of the streets from Garden Grove, was describing Fico’s survival blanket as a familiar, and welcome, friend.

“This is like my sixth one,” said Brooks, who lauded the blanket as a high-quality pup tent or a tarpaulin to keep possessions dry. Just yards away, a family was already using one of the survival blankets as an impromptu picnic blanket. “I gave some away to people worse off, others got stolen or lost. But they are great, better than any raincoat.”

While his volunteers passed out more blankets and socks, Fico, smiling with obvious pride, again demonstrated how to use the clasps along the edge of the blanket to convert it to a poncho. “The next version we get in two weeks, and it’ll have pockets inside and a drawstring,” he said gleefully.

His longtime assistant and stepson, Contreras, said Fico’s “sterling quality is that he’s genuine.

“There’s no guile in the guy . . . there’s nothing there to see through,” Contreras said. “And people respond to that because they can see that. All he wants to do is help.”