A Taste of Home

Peggy Gaylord has come to the corner of 5th Street and Towne Avenue in downtown Los Angeles to find someone.

She does not know who it is, so she treats everyone here the same: Everyone receives a heaping plate of food. Everyone is prayed for. Everyone is thought worthy--even the man with the white plastic fork sticking out of his matted hair. And the woman who wanders about hugging herself, looking lost and confused.

“How many pounds of coal do you have to sift to get a diamond? That’s the approach she takes,” said Gaylord’s friend and neighbor Bill Pennerman. “She invests what she has looking for one person that might be changed.”

Gaylord, the founder of Outreach Mission We Care, has visited this corner for six years.

Once a month the 77-year-old South Los Angeles resident and a cadre of volunteers bring a taste of home to the street--pans of barbecue, steaming pots of vegetables, potato salad, baked beans, corn bread, wheat bread, cake and punch.

The volunteers do not have the backing of a large foundation or church, or a budget. In fact, Gaylord started out buying food using her monthly Social Security check. That was the only thing to do, she said, after she had a dream and the Lord told her to feed the hungry.

“I knew good and well if he said do it, it was gonna be done,” she said.

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Gaylord is a 40-year member of St. Andrews Missionary Baptist Church, and faith is the bedrock of her life.

But Gaylord also has another asset, a way of moving among people, dirty or clean, sober or addicted, as if they are somebody. And when people see her--a grandmotherly woman, at ease among people others fear--it moves something inside of them.

“She has instilled in us how to do it, how it should be done,” said volunteer Erma Jean Hall-Wood.

By 8 a.m. on this bright Saturday morning, Gaylord and the volunteers have set up wooden tables in front of a metal gate topped with barbed wire. A long line stretches down the street, across from a seafood processing company. Five at a time, men and women step up to the tables to be served. Women first. No cutting.

“It don’t stop here,” said Brandy Sanders, holding a plate of food in one hand and a bag of clothes in the other. The woman she calls “Sister Gaylord” once did something Sanders will never forget: “She took me to her house,” Sanders said.

Sanders and her husband were living on the street when Sanders heard of a job opportunity. But she had no clothes, no decent shoes, and no way to look like a person with a job. That Saturday, she told Gaylord, who then invited her to visit.

“She gave me clothes, shoes, cologne, personal hygiene products,” Sanders said, while in the distance Gaylord handed out hugs and said “Hi, baby” to the people in line.

“A lot of people bring things down here, but for them to take you into their house? That’s something different.”

Gaylord, gray-haired, with smiling eyes and a voice tinged with the South, has spent a lifetime learning how to turn negatives into positives.

“I’m glad I didn’t get some things in life,” Gaylord said. “I’d probably be propped up. As soon as we get a dress and a good pair of shoes, we forget from where we came.”

Gaylord, who is also known as Virgie, grew up in Grande Cane, a small Louisiana town. She still remembers sewing a dress from the thread of an unraveled flour sack, wearing clothes handed down by white people, and being forced to leave school to work. She took in laundry as a teenager and worked in cotton fields. There were nights when she went to sleep hungry.

“I know what having a hard time is and I’m not ashamed to tell how far God brought me,” she said. “Where I came from they didn’t have no [welfare]. I didn’t hear about nobody getting no check. I worked and worked.”

Those who know Gaylord know that her memories as well as her faith push her to act.

Gaylord moved to Los Angeles in 1944, living in South Los Angeles and doing domestic work for Hollywood studio professionals in Bel-Air. Her modest home is now the mission’s headquarters. Out back a small shed holds surplus food that is donated by stores, restaurants and a food bank.

Divorced and a great-great-grandmother, Gaylord becomes riled at the thought of wastefulness. America wastes 96 billion pounds of food a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“When I was hungry it taught me to help somebody who was down and hungry,” she said. “The Lord has blessed me, and that’s why I care about people.”

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Over the years Gaylord has come to rely on the volunteers--many from St. Andrews--who dip into their pockets and kitchens to help.

She recalls their help as easily as their names: “This is Esther Jones; she makes 300 corn muffins every month,” Gaylord said. “This is Tommie Sanders. He picked up the food in his truck. Mr. Cooper, he does all the meat. Ellis Johnson cooked the collard greens. Arlee Anderson made that good dressing. Hillard King brought down the tables.” And on and on.

At first Hall-Wood was not moved by the thought of spending Saturday morning in the heart of downtown. Now she is on the street early, serving up barbecued chicken, smiling at familiar faces, and holding easy conversations with people in line.

“We also want them to know that their minds and souls need to be fed,” Hall-Wood said. “We take them aside and counsel with them, pray for them.”

Theodis McLeod, the mission’s president, missed a day of work to be on the street.

“It’s all right to go to church,” McLeod said. “But action is outside the church. It’s giving something back.”

And the volunteers have help from the old-timers in line, like Robert Jordan and Booker T. Swoope, who help keep things running smoothly.

“No, no, no,” Swoope said to a man who had crept to the front, “Men in the back.”

“I been here since Day 1,” Swoope said, with pride. “It’s the best service in downtown L.A. It’s down home cooking.”

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By 9:40 a.m. the counter read 403 people fed. Still there were latecomers who missed out, who contented themselves by selecting clothing that the volunteers gave away.

“I’m sorry y’all didn’t get to eat,” Gaylord said to the stragglers, streaming by empty tables.

For her work, Gaylord has been honored by everyone from the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People to the governor.

But the true measure in work like this is persistence, Pennerman said.

“And she’s staying in it,” he said. “Something inside of her heart wants people to have a new direction.”