COLUMN ONE : The Food Angel of 42nd Street : Mae Raines loads an old pickup with donated food and hands it out in some of the city’s poorest areas. ‘When I can ease someone’s pain, I feel good,’ she says.

To the children running excitedly after her rusty blue 1978 Dodge pickup for a piece of bread, or an orange, she is Mother Raines or the Muffin Lady.

Mae Raines’ food truck pulls to a stop in South-Central Los Angeles and she begins the task of easing hunger. “A lot of kids don’t know what a snack or lunch is,” says Mae, who watches some children devour whole bags of bread. Women sometimes sob when she puts food in their hands. Men bow their heads and say thanks.

At 71, when most are quietly enjoying their golden years, Mae spends her time hauling truckloads of food to some of the most dangerous streets in Los Angeles, places many people in the City of Angels avoid. In her mind, she is simply a good Christian. “God said: Take care of the poor and the widows. I do what the Word says,” says Mae, a widow herself. To her neighbors, she is the food angel of 42nd Street.

*

On a crisp autumn morning with wisps of clouds in the sky, Mae arrives at the Los Angeles wholesale produce market’s “charity dock,” where she gets donations of fruits, vegetables and bread. An ample woman, Mae--clad in flowing purple culottes, black high-top sneakers and a royal blue beret covering salt-and-pepper hair--points two of her foster sons at boxes of food to load. The boys pile the scratched and scarred Dodge with loaves of bread, sweet corn, oranges, pumpkins, even doughnuts. And they never forget an item children in her neighborhood south of the Coliseum count on Mae to bring: English muffins.

“We need radishes, four boxes,” Mae prods her foster son, Donell.

An hour later, Mae and the children scramble into the cab of the truck. The squeaky doors clang shut. She grasps her window and pushes it down by hand. Peering out the shattered windshield, she eases away from the concrete loading dock, heading south, through the warehouse district near Downtown, over two railroad tracks, past rubble-strewn lots and graffiti-marred walls, zigzagging into the heart of the city.

*

Rolling past low-slung houses, Mae’s food wagon brakes at her first stop. Most who converge on her truck are very old or very young.

One 4-year-old boy, Minor Beli, can barely believe it when Mae holds out a box of doughnuts. “Do you want it?” she asks. For a moment, Minor hesitates, then reaches out, tightly grasping the box. His eyes look lovingly at the treat, then at Mae. Minor’s mother, Ana Beli, 27, says she must often limit how much her children eat to stretch their food to the end of the month. “When I pay the rent, there is little left,” she says.

The Belis pay $350 a month for a room in a house they share with another family. Her husband works for minimum wage as a garment worker. Last night, she says, Minor, 2-year-old Jennifer and Angel, 7 months, ate one egg each.

Mary Lou Ellis, an 83-year-old with tufts of gray hair peeking out from under her cap, hobbles down the block to Mae’s truck. Mae thrusts a bag of bread, radishes and tomatoes into trembling hands. “Oh lordy, lordy. Thank you! Thank you!” the woman says, beaming at Mae.

The former Lockheed Corp. riveter and housecleaner says that there often isn’t enough food, so she skips meals. The rent eats up $400 of her $645 Social Security check. Utilities consume most of the rest. Someone swindled her out of her meager retirement savings, she says. Her house was emptied of furniture in a recent break-in. She leans heavily on her brown cane and stares hard at the ground. “I’ve never lived like this,” she says, confessing to no one in particular. “I feel like taking a gun and shooting my brains out.”

The stooped woman hobbles away. But as word gets out, her neighbors emerge from their homes, creating a crowd. “Are you selling this?” one woman asks. Mae turns to her with a warm smile. “No,” she says, “I’m giving it away.”

“Oh! There’s my girl,” Mary Washington squeals at Mae, who has helped her ever since she fell and broke her neck a decade ago. A former cook and janitor, she points to a long surgical scar that runs the length of her neck. Her head tilts to the side. Ever since the accident, seizures have made it hard to keep a job.

“She’ll dress you. She’ll feed you,” she says, stroking Mae’s shoulder as her friend fills a bag with radishes and corn. Each month, she tries to survive on $212 in welfare--which lets her rent a room in a house--and $103 in food stamps. Collecting cans and bottles from trash bins brings in $15 more, which buys some food for the end of the month.

Mae is her buffer against hunger: “She bring us food. She sure do. She’s the grace of God.” Grasping a pumpkin with fingers horribly bloated by diabetes, she coos with delight as Mae eases a can of pork and beans into her bag. “Thank you a lots!” Mary says, her eyes twinkling.

The bags of bread begin to steam in the midday heat. Mae has fed 25 families, some Latino, most black.

She hands food bags to a grandmother in a tattered polyester skirt and a gang member covered in tattoos who hugs and kisses her, saying he can’t find a job and must hustle the streets to feed his four children.

“Vendiendo or regalando? “ one woman asks tentatively. “Selling or giving?” Mae, who doesn’t speak Spanish, hands the woman a white enamel cup, raises four fingers, and points her to a large bag of red beans. The woman scoops out four cups. “All right! That’s it!” Mae says, chiding herself because she has given out so much in one stop that others may go without. She crawls back into the cab of her truck, and rolls on.

*

Mae began this journey when she was a little girl in Dallas. As a child during the Depression, she helped her grandmother carry home tin buckets of government-issued milk. By 11, she was working, washing dishes for $1.50 a week after school.

Her father was a chauffeur for a priest. “My daddy cared about people,” Mae says simply. “If we had plenty, we could only keep so much.” At Thanksgiving, when the family received five baskets of food from the priest, her mother kept two. Three went to needy neighbors. Year-round, Mae’s home was open to strangers--from visiting church members to black circus employees who were barred from local hotels. To accommodate the constant stream, Mae and her siblings often slept on the floor.

When Mae was 18, her father moved the family to Los Angeles--hoping that discrimination against blacks would be less pronounced.

She first glimpsed the face of hunger at a South-Central bread store where she worked much of her early life, bagging and selling loaves for 15 cents. One 8-year-old boy, whose father had died, stopped at the store every day, asking her for work, saying he had nothing to eat. “After him,” Mae says, “I started to notice.” She lobbied the company’s owner to let her give to the hungry some of the day-old or over-baked loaves being sold for hog feed. Many parents broke the stale bread with their children right in the store.

As a teacher’s aide in Los Angeles schools in the 1970s, she saw that hunger was ever-present. One preschooler tucked half his lunch into his pants pocket, stowing away something--cereal, or a piece of liver wrapped in napkins--to take home to his younger sister. Mae brought bags of fruit, a tray of cookies and four dozen cupcakes each Monday.

In 1980, at 56, she retired after an accident led to back surgery to remove a disk. She retired, that is, to begin hauling truckloads of food several times a month through the streets of Watts, Compton and her own neighborhood. She pays for some of the food herself, with money from Social Security and a meager retirement fund; most of it, however, is donated by World Opportunities International, which operates the charity dock at the produce market.

Mae--who raised three children of her own--often takes some of her four foster children on her food runs. Chris, 11, and Cee, 13--who are from Thailand--were removed from abusive parents. Donnie, 18, is autistic and is unable to speak or perform life’s most basic functions without help. Donell, 26, has been with Mae for 10 years. His birth mother said she wanted nothing to do with him when Donell, who is mentally retarded, turned 18 and was released from foster care, Mae says.

Two years ago, at 69, Mae took in a 2-day-old crack baby for a year. She has had 10 foster children over the years, and also has taken in 10 other neighborhood children off and on, occasionally sleeping on the living room window seat to accommodate them.

*

Sometimes, the tough grandmother feels fear on her food runs. Once, she had driven her truck Downtown to Skid Row, parked and begun laying out pans of homemade rice, chicken wings, cheese toast and cobbler. Chris and Cee were at her side, wrapping forks and spoons in napkins. A group of homeless men gathered around her menacingly. Mae quickly solicited one of the ragged men to help her. “You can come here anytime,” he said, staring down the others. “I guarantee no one will take advantage of you and your children.” She fed 200 that day.

Mae’s neighborhood is rough, too. In recent years, two neighbors’ sons--neither one in gangs--were killed in drive-bys, shot through the back and neck. One, an 18-year-old boy, was buried in a grave site Mae had purchased for herself. The Menlo Avenue School one block from her home has a “gunfire evacuation plan.” Its schoolyard has been sprayed with bullets 10 times in the past year and a half, once just as kindergarten was letting out, says Principal Arthur W. Chandler. Police helicopters often hover overhead, tracking clashes among the 18th Street Gang, the Rolling 40 Crips and increasingly violent tagging groups such as the Dirty Old Men.

Poverty is another mounting concern. Part of Mae’s route traverses an area of South-Central in which more than one in four residents didn’t have the resources to feed themselves the entire month, according to a UCLA study.

Since the 1980s, as a growing tide of poverty has left more people hungry, the efforts of nonprofit groups and individuals have become increasingly critical in curbing hunger’s toll. “The government cannot do it all. If it weren’t for the private sector, the tragedy would be, I think, unbelievable,” says Roy B. McKeown, president of World Opportunities. Requests from people like Mae, he says, have become more urgent in recent years as joblessness in the inner cities has skyrocketed.

*

Mae’s drive through this hungry landscape often includes a stop at her neighborhood Unocal gas station. “C’mon baby,” she beckons to a man furiously washing windshields one recent day. Word spreads like wildfire down the street. Soon, the truck is surrounded by homeless women and men, many of whom have known Mae for years. She plucks oranges, apples and bread from boxes around the rim of the truck.

One bag goes to Tyrone Richardson, a 32-year-old unemployed construction worker. Taking the food, he fishes a wadded-up dollar bill from his pants. He stuffs it into Mae’s shirt pocket. “This will help you get gas to help others. Sometimes I don’t have a dime. Today I do,” he says. The gift amounts to half of his total assets. Mae vehemently refuses the money. But, cradling a watermelon in his arm, he walks away, saying only, “She got a good heart.”

“This is what we do,” Mae says simply, stuffing more plastic bags with food.

“What’s the problem? Tell me?” Mae quietly asks Sheree Wilson, 31, who has been homeless for three months and was headed to Jack-in-the-Box to eat a free packet of jelly when she noticed Mae’s truck.

“This is my baby,” the woman says, pulling from her jacket a crumpled photograph of her 1-year-old boy, Joshua, beaming from his crib. She stops peeling her orange and begins to sob, explaining that she left the baby with her mother because she is addicted to crack and “going crazy.”

She says her best friend, who was on the streets with her, was recently arrested for prostitution and drug dealing. Now that she’s alone, the streets are wildly dangerous. She’s not sure how to get out, or if she has the will to leave crack behind.

Mae pulls out a small coin purse, counts out four quarters. Then, standing by her truck, Mae lays her hand on the woman’s chest and leads her in prayer. “You are gonna be all right. Nothing is too hard,” she urges.

“I have faith,” Sheree says, lovingly fingering the picture of her son. “I just went the other way.”

Mae pulls out of the station, leaving behind a destitute crowd on the blacktop, all of them munching apples.

It’s not long before Mae happens upon Rosa Ramirez, 20, with her two children, Marbella Heredia, 1, and Jose Heredia, 2. Her husband, she explains, gets sporadic work in the garment industry. Now, things are slow and he brings home as little as $50 a week. Marbella virtually inhales an orange she grasps in her tiny right hand. The juice cascades down her chin, trickling onto her white sweater. “I try to feed them something every day. Sometimes, it’s just rice and beans,” she says.

Mae prepares to leave, but Jose’s brown eyes look pleadingly at her as he stuffs the orange into his mouth. “More?” he asks.

*

Mae’s last stop of the day is Tarlee McCrady’s house on Raymond Avenue. Mae peers inside the two-story house from her truck and, seeing no sign of life, drives on. But a loud pleading wail comes from behind the front door: “I’m here! I’m here!”

Mae parks in the shade. “You want a pumpkin?” she asks. The woman, who has sweptback gray hair, runs out and nods.

A 65-year-old living on Social Security, she met Mae in church nearly two decades ago. When her body is up to it, she goes out on the truck with Mae, helping distribute food. Today, she says, she is fretting over how to pay her water bill. She, too, gets much of her sustenance from Mae.

If not for the help, she says, “I’d be down on Skid Row. What else would I do?”

“She doesn’t do a lot of talking. But she does a whole lot of doing,” says Brenda White, who works at Church of the Harvest, which Mae attends. She says she’s seen Mae take a bed out of her house--even the food in her own refrigerator--and give it away. Brenda, who has two daughters, was divorced six years ago and had a breakdown, leaving her temporarily unable to work at her hair salon. She was too embarrassed to ask for help from relatives. Mae didn’t need prodding. Every other week, she began to bring bags of food.

In addition to her Social Security, Mae receives a modest income from caring for her foster children. Everything that’s left after paying bills--about $100 a month--is put in a coin purse and slowly given out to people in need. The only handout she’s taken from the government is some cheese.

“People have millions of dollars, they die, and their children fuss over it. I give my surplus money for children,” she says.

Mae, nearing exhaustion, steers her truck home.

*

Wheeling into her driveway, Mae still has a third of the food. “Hi, Mother Raines!” a little girl from next door cries, waving. Other neighbors drop by. “What kind of bread you need? Brown bread? White bread? Your grandma feel better today?” Mae asks Erick, 8. He nods. Mae knows that many neighbors skip some meals each day but are too embarrassed to ask for food. “I know which ones won’t come out,” she says. “Some people would rather die than ask for help.” For these, she packs boxes, which Donell begins delivering on people’s stoops.

“I work in the shadows of an inner city overrun by gangs and riotous living. But when I can ease someone’s pain, or can encourage them, I feel good,” Mae says. “If I never do anything for the community I live in, why am I here? I don’t want to hear the baby next door cry from lack of milk or see a child walk by without shoes.

“It’s not hopeless. Everyone isn’t extending themselves.”

On Thanksgiving Day, Mae says, she will bake 17 traditional dishes. In the morning, her natural and foster children will gather, and read prayers. “Thanksgiving is for my family,” Mae says, closing her front gate as the last of the food is dispensed and dusk approaches. That said, Mae concedes that last year, she gathered her leftovers at the end of the day, some paper plates and plastic silverware and summoned her children to help. She went to the corner of her street and served food to the thankful until every crumb was gone.

About This Series

In this series, The Times examines four battlegrounds in the war on hunger in Southern California.

* Sunday: Hungry children, caught in the battles over school breakfast.

* Monday: The growing salvage food industry--spawned by hard times--takes a bite out of charitable food banks.

* Tuesday: U.S. Department of Agriculture changes course and launches a crusade to attract more people to food stamps.

* Today: A one-woman crusade to ease neighborhood hunger, one family at a time.