Hunger Fighter Rises From Skid Row to Rose Garden

Former actor, drunk and Skid Row denizen Ray Castellani leaves tomorrow for Washington, D.C., and a meeting Thursday with President Clinton in the White House Rose Garden.

Castellani will be one of 18 Americans honored with a Presidential Service Award during National Volunteer Week.

Castellani, a 61-year-old resident of Tarzana, is the founder and driving force behind the San Fernando Valley-based Frontline Foundation, begun in 1987 to feed men and women on Skid Row.

He started the organization with a personal vision, a couple of friends, a few loaves of bread and some peanut butter and jelly.

He would make the sandwiches in a Sherman Oaks church kitchen, drive to Downtown Los Angeles and hand them out to anyone who appeared to be in need.

Soon people heard about his work and joined his all-volunteer effort, which to date has given away about 450,000 simple and filling brown-bag meals to the hungry in the Skid Rows of Los Angeles and more recently in Hollywood and Pasadena.

Some volunteers collect food, some prepare, bag and deliver it. Other volunteers raise funds and help with other chores. The delivery trucks have been donated by local companies. J.C. Penney has been an ongoing supporter. Rent on the Van Nuys warehouse where the group operates is donated by 80 contributors who give $10 each per month.

Castellani, whose efforts were initially greeted with suspicion by the hard cases on the mean Downtown streets, is now greeted by hundreds who know him by name.

“I don’t ask anything from the people there,” he says. “I’m not out to change them or to save them. I just want to give them something to eat.”

Castellani, an actor whose alcoholism allowed him to experience life on many of the Skid Rows around the country, has private reasons for refusing any money for the work he does.

It is some kind of contract he has with his God or his higher power. That’s just the way it is, he says.

Born in Albany, N.Y., in 1933, he was abandoned, because of hard times or indifference, by his parents. He lived in a series of orphanages, getting little or no education, until he ran away when he was 7.

“I made my way to where my grandfather lived in a basement apartment and begged him to let me stay with him,” Castellani remembers. “The only emotion I’d ever experienced up to then was loneliness.”

He grew up living with his grandfather in that cold, small cellar. By the age of 10, he could still barely read or write. Although by this time he was a steady student at the local elementary school, he had no social skills and didn’t know how to relate to other students or to his teachers.

“I was ashamed to be older than the other kids in my classes, and I was mad,” he says. “I would start a fight at the drop of a hat.”

By 13, he was using alcohol as an emotional aspirin. At 17, his alcoholism was full blown, Castellani says.

After a stint in the Marines, he went to Broadway to become an actor, and he got some stage parts. He then went to Hollywood and did episodic television. “Bonanza,” “Hart to Hart,” that sort of thing.

He brought his wife and the first of his four children to Hollywood with him. Success was coming to him just as alcohol was wiping away his talent and his memory.

By the mid-’60s, he says, his alcoholism was so bad he couldn’t remember his lines or even where he was supposed to be working.

He didn’t care. Booze was all that mattered to him.

In 1969, he was estranged from his wife and children. He was also bleeding internally. Death was at his stage door.

By the time he made his way to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, he says, his career was a casualty of his addiction.

He was in a kind of limbo throughout most of the ‘70s and ‘80s. No steady work. No real ties. He was wondering why he had worked so hard to beat alcohol when his life seemed to lack any purpose.

“I finally got in my old truck with my belongings and just started driving around the West like a madman,” he says. “I never knew where I was. I was just driving around.”

Somewhere, during that two-month drive, Castellani says he experienced a personal epiphany.

He headed back to the San Fernando Valley to begin his new mission in life.

The recitation of Castellani’s resurrection and personal redemption did not end with his living happily ever after. Castellani is too stubborn for that.

“I knew I should never take money for the work I was doing with the Frontline Foundation. No salary. No nothing.”

This meant that in addition to spending 30 to 60 hours a week volunteering at the foundation, he was surviving by selling hot dogs from a cart at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura boulevards every day.

About five years ago he married a woman 35 years younger than he. She’s younger than any of Castellani’s children. Noreen Golder was a UCLA political science major, hoping to help save the world.

“You know how idealistic you are in school, so when a friend took me to help out in the kitchen and in handing out the brown-bag lunches for Frontline Foundation, I thought, ‘This guy is really doing something. He’s not just talking about it,’ ” says Golder.

She has since proved to be a worthy colleague. She has brought organization to the organization, set up groups to oversee specific functions, gone after grant money, helped write and publish a newsletter and leads the organization’s public relations--in addition to working as a substitute teacher to keep food on the Castellani family table.

“Don’t think I don’t know how lucky I am,” Castellani says.

A couple of years back he went through some bad patches, where both his health and his energy threatened to abandon him. Neither he nor Golder was willing to give up.

She will be with him in Washington when he receives his presidential citation, as is only fitting.

Castellani, typically, is interested in the honor because it will be a good way to help draw interest to his work on Skid Row.

But, he’s got to think, when he’s standing in the Rose Garden with those 17 other honorees, how far he’s come from that frail, hungry child who stood banging on his grandfather’s basement door.

Overheard:

“You may think of my car as a piece of secondhand junk that should be disregarded. I look upon it as a Renaissance work in recycling.”

Young man in Sherman Oaks trying to explain his antique, and richly dented, Subaru to his date.