Unlikely Pipeline Links Pennsylvania Farmers’ Bounty to Bowery

Paul Beyer was on his knees in his garden when the man who would change his life, and through him the lives of many others, walked into the yard.

The man said he was Pop Sweigert, a fellow Mennonite, and he needed help collecting food for the Bowery Mission in New York City.

Beyer, a 31-year-old mechanic, had never heard of Pop Sweigert or the Bowery Mission. He’d been to New York once, and the traffic was so wild he’d vowed he’d never drive back.

But Mennonites are Christians who believe that to serve the poor is to serve Christ. So, a few weeks later, Beyer was heading to the Bowery with a carful of vegetables donated by farmers here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Thirty-five years later, Paul Beyer still makes the six-hour round trip each week. But now there is so much food that he stores some near home in a walk-in freezer and delivers the rest in a refrigerated truck.

Lancaster County, rather incredibly, gives the Bowery Mission about two-thirds of the food it uses to serve between 500 and 600 meals a day.

Lancaster’s carpet of farms and fields is a landscape as beautiful as man has made. Nowhere else do the urban poor seem more remote, more forgettable; yet nowhere else do people seem to care so much about them.

“A lot of people this time of year feel pity for the poor,” said the mission’s director, George Ibach, “but it only becomes compassion when you put your feelings into action.”

The Bowery connection dates to Thanksgiving 1952. A Mennonite bishop from Gap, Pa., had come to New York that fall for a meeting at the United Nations and wound up visiting the Bowery Mission, which had been filling stomachs and saving souls on the world’s most notorious Skid Row since 1879.

Bowery means farm in Dutch, and once it was as green as Lancaster County. But by the turn of the century, the avenue was lined with flophouses and dives and populated by thousands of derelicts and alcoholics; it got so dangerous that even prostitutes shunned it.

The bishop was so inspired by the mission that, when he got back to the Mennonite heartland, he asked Sweigert to gather food for Thanksgiving and bring it to the mission. This became a regular shuttle.

Within a few years, the job was getting bigger and Sweigert was getting older. So, for reasons unclear, he reached out to Paul Beyer. When Sweigert retired to Florida, Beyer took over.

What began as an unsought task has become a sacred mission. From the first beans in spring to the last cabbage of autumn, through winter’s sleet and snow, Beyer has linked one of America’s most heavenly areas to one of its most hellish.

For a decade, Beyer made the deliveries in his own car, on his own time, at his own expense. Then, in 1985, the mission offered him a salary--albeit one that could cut his hourly wage in half.

“One of the hardest decisions I ever made,” said Beyer, now 65, of the experience. “I prayed, ‘Lord, if you want me to do this, see that the bills get paid.’ And I’m never sorry I did it. Sometimes I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it’s there.”

The Lord provides in another way, Beyer says: He never has to ask for food for the mission. People call, drop by, stop him on the road when they see the Bowery Mission logo on his truck. “We built it up like that, mouth to mouth, people to people,” he said. “Every year, I get more calls.”

Last spring, the Upper Conewago Church of the Brethren planted a field of corn--the “Lord’s Acre.” This fall, the congregation spent a day picking, husking, cutting, cooking, bagging and freezing 674 quarts of corn for the mission.

One night last month, the congregation of the Martindale Mennonite Church gathered, as it has for 20 years, to make applesauce for the mission. About 100 people cut up 40 bushels of apples--schnitzing, it’s called--and filled 674 jars.

It’s not just Mennonites, and it’s not just churches. Sauder’s Eggs contributes 90 dozen eggs a month, and Achenback Pastry donates everything from jumbo birthday cakes to donuts. It also has hired several former drug abusers who lived at the mission.

The Bowery connection is sustained by scores of less monumental contributions. On a recent morning, John Shenk, 41, grunted as he lifted boxes of broccoli and cabbage from his farm onto Beyer’s truck.

“This broccoli grew from a seed this small,” he said, joining his index finger and thumb to indicate the miracle. “It’s God’s, and it’s clear in the Old Testament and the New Testament what God wants us to do with what he’s given us. . . . That’s what Thanksgiving is about.”

A few hours later, Beyer was driving along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. A sticker over the rearview mirror repeated Paul’s injunction to the Galatians: “Bear one another’s burdens.”

In back, at 48 degrees, was God’s bounty: 20-pound watermelons, butternut squashes the size and shape of oxen yokes, frozen turkeys and fish fillets, a crate of Macintosh apples, six boxes of frozen bagels, a sack of potatoes, several trays of pastries, and one thick slice of quiche in a plastic foam container.

Beyer, normally taciturn, gushed about how he looks forward to these trips: “When you get to the mission, the guys are glad to see you. They give you a hug. I’ll tell you, that really means something. It gives you a good feeling.”

He has never had an accident, gotten a ticket or needed to spend a night on the road or in the city.

“The Lord’s been good,” he nodded, “and I keep thankin’ him for these safe trips back and forth.”

But he wonders, after all these years, why Pop Sweigert asked him. Although they spent countless hours on this very route, Beyer never asked, and now Pop has been dead 10 years. He says he’ll call Pop’s daughter in Florida. Maybe she knows.

Finally, after a long silence, he announced in his flat, Pennsylvania Dutch drawl: “I think the Lord was tellin’ him to come to me.”

An hour after sunset, he turned off the New Jersey Turnpike toward the Manhattan skyline. Which prompted a confession: He has never visited the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and, in fact, never deviates from his course--Holland Tunnel to Canal Street, left on West Broadway, right on Spring, left onto Bowery.

“I know how to get into the mission and how to get out,” he said as the truck bounced past the snazzy restaurants and galleries of Soho. “That’s all I want to know.”

It was drizzling as he turned onto Bowery, which is no longer a teeming slum--it’s known for lighting and restaurant supply stores--but feels as forlorn as ever after dark.

Beyer pulled to the curb outside the brick mission. “We’re here!” he announced, as though he’d arrived at The Pierre.

“He’s here!” The cry rose as Beyer walked in the mission’s red front door. Someone got on the intercom: “Paul Beyer is here. All hands on deck. Let’s rock ‘n’ roll.” In 20 minutes, the formerly homeless men who live at the mission had the truck unloaded.

Beyer seemed totally at home as he sat back, munching an apple, even though he was the whitest, squarest man in the house. And why not? He’d been coming here since before most of the residents were born.

“Hey, Paul,” said a barrel-chested young black man who came over with a hug. “We wait for you, man. We love you.”

That night, the dining hall reverberated with the sounds of good food being eaten by the hungry. Each man at the feast was thankful, but none more than the one who brought it.