Volunteers Give Thanks Through Hard, Happy Work

In the massive kitchen at a skid row mission, Harry Keller is hosing down plates slick with turkey gravy and pans speckled with syrupy bits of sweet potatoes. He’s sloshing water all over his neat gray slacks.

It’s Thanksgiving Day, and this is what volunteers are for.

But it’s also Keller’s regular day to give thanks for a life that could have ended on the streets long ago.

Every Thursday for the last year, the 63-year-old security guard has taken a bus from his home near Silver Lake to the Union Rescue Mission downtown, where he performs any odd job handed him. He has sliced vegetables, made sandwiches, assembled furniture, sorted mail and unloaded trucks of clothes, toys and food. All without complaint, and no thanks needed.

“He doesn’t need the spotlight. He just wants to help,” said Dale Fitch, the mission’s director of church relations, who calls Keller one of his most dedicated volunteers.

But unlike many of the men, women and children who trooped through the mission’s doors Thursday to help in the kitchen or serve the free turkey dinners, Keller can gaze on the hungry diners and say, “I’ve been there.”

On Thursday, Fitch was expecting about 100 volunteers to help prepare and serve about 2,000 meals--turkeys roasted in rosemary, basil and garlic powder, candied sweet potatoes, hot rolls and a fresh fruit salad. Some had rolled up their sleeves long before the holiday began. Chef Sidney Lucas, who cooks for a Van Nuys catering company, started preparing the 350 turkeys a week ago.

For others, like Edgar Pineda of Huntington Beach, donning an apron in the mission kitchen is a yearly ritual. Pineda, a maintenance engineer for a convalescent home, arrived at 5 a.m., as he has every Thanksgiving for the last seven years, and spent the morning cleaning turkey carcasses, separating drums and thighs, and piling the pieces on huge aluminum pans.

“I can’t explain it,” said Pineda, who heard about the mission from a friend, “but I’m grateful to come here. It makes you realize what life is really about.”

The same spirit was evident around the city, from a Fox Hills grocery where owner Jong Lee fed about 30 senior citizens at noontime, to an Elks lodge in San Fernando where 500 people were served meals and care packages donated by community groups. At Rancho Park in West Los Angeles, about 200 vegetarians held a turkeyless celebration centered around meditation, yoga, music and animal-free food.

But for Keller, Thursday was a day for sober reflection as well as service.

He has done things in his life that he is ashamed of. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles from New York 30 years ago, he descended into a world of nightclubs, pills and booze. Jobless, his money wasted on drugs, he was evicted from his apartment and spent nights walking the streets or sleeping in the Greyhound bus terminal downtown.

He was afraid to call home to ask his father for money. “I just thought how much it would hurt him, so I didn’t do it,” he said.

It sounds corny now, but one day he was sitting in a bar by himself when he heard a voice. It said, “Leave this place and get your life in order.”

Keller thought he was losing his mind. He rushed home, ashen-faced and shaking. His wife, Mary, told him he had better go to church and get some spiritual guidance. He was scared enough to listen. He began attending church services. He stopped the pills and the drinking. He found work as a bit player on TV--”Cagney & Lacey,” “It’s a Living”--and later as a security guard in a museum. He played congas for a gospel band.

“I’m thankful that God opened my eyes and changed my life,” he said.

That’s not what brought him to the mission, however. A few years ago, Keller’s son--one of his eight children--started down the same reckless path he had walked decades earlier. He was abusing cocaine, consorting with gang members, robbing to support his drug habit.

Drug treatment programs didn’t work. Finally, Keller and his son agreed that the only way out was to leave town. With his father’s help, he moved to Florida. There, he began to put his life together. He joined a youth ministry and found steady work in a hospital cleaning operating rooms.

About a year later, he came home for a visit and couldn’t stop talking about his work in Florida helping wayward youths. Keller was dumbstruck by his transformation--and envious.

“I used to have that same spirit working in my life, and I wanted it back,” Keller said, pulling a napkin out of his pocket to dab at tears.

That’s what brought him to the mission.

He remembered playing there with his band years ago. So he rode downtown and talked to Fitch. Now he arrives about 8 a.m. every Thursday, his day off from security work. Even if the work is drudgery--lately, he’s been posted in the office, opening mail and shredding old correspondence--he leaves feeling better than when he arrived.

“Whenever I leave here,” Keller said, “I’m on a cloud. I wish I could do it all the time.”

Times staff writers Peter Noah and Kimberly Sanchez contributed to this story.