Economy Rings In Shortage in Kettle Corps

The work is not all that difficult: Stand in place, ring bell, smile, thank-you-ma’am. Stand, ring, smile, Merry Christmas. Stand, ring, smile, thank-you-sir.

It’s minimum wage or maybe a bit more but you keep your hands clean and there is no heavy lifting. Even so, the Salvation Army has been hard-pressed to find reliable kettle tenders in this year of record-low unemployment.

The Salvationists, as they call themselves, have been cursed with the good times that have kept many of us more or less gainfully employed.

“It’s been really rough,” said Kittie Fidermutz, who runs the kettle operation in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Moorpark. “People aren’t knocking on our doors the way they once did.”

Some who do are just the kind of kettle custodians you would want handling large, uncounted troves of cash. But then there are the others: Fidermutz has gone through a dozen since Thanksgiving--idlers who prefer bathroom breaks to bell-ringing, layabouts who fall asleep at the kettle, worker barely-wanna-be’s who just never show up, homeless people who defy our rags-to-riches expectations and simply fade into the night.

“And if they don’t look respectable, people won’t want to leave money,” Fidermutz lamented, drawing the inevitable bottom line.

In Oxnard, Salvation Army Capt. Norman Patton was also singing the blues.

He has 23 kettles but on some days the bell-ringer shortage is so severe that only half are out. So far, collections are down $8,000, or nearly 20%.

“We just can’t pay enough,” he said. “We started out advertising at minimum wage and we didn’t get anyone. Then we raised it to $6--but when people can go to Wal-Mart or Target and get $7 an hour for seasonal work, we can’t compete.”

Of course, the Salvation Army has always relied on the kindness of strangers. Service clubs and churches still send cheerful volunteers to the front, but the bulk of the work--Army people call it “kettling”--falls to modestly paid soldiers like Tootie Glasscock.

Outside Mervyn’s in Ventura, 73-year-old Tootie rang a bell she could barely hear. She needs another hearing aid but she hopes to use her kettling paycheck for a down payment on dentures. When a shy little girl slipped two quarters into the kettle, Tootie, a former waitress, responded with gusto: “God bless you, dear! Thank you! Merry Christmas!”

For five or 10 minutes every couple of hours, she sits on a folding chair. The rest of her eight-hour shift, she tucks it into a corner and stays planted on her feet, as if sitting would diminish the dignity of collecting for the poor.

“It would make me feel foolish,” she said. “God bless you! Thank you! Merry Christmas!”

At Janss Marketplace in Thousand Oaks, Ignacio Mas took a similarly professional approach. At 33, he has kettled for 14 years and has picked up a trick or two.

“I choose to be religiously neutral,” he said, noting that “merry Christmas!” is not as inclusive an expression of good cheer as “happy holidays!”

Mas speaks in wonderfully complete sentences. He was telling me about his career as a movie extra--”Among the more notable projects I’ve worked on is ‘Forrest Gump’ “--when a woman with long blond hair dropped by to let us know about the conspiracy keeping her away from her children and off her top-secret government job.

“My security clearance is--well, I’m probably violating regulations here but it’s--it’s the color of this,” she said, grasping the black metal frame holding the kettle.

Mas and I looked at each other.

Later, he told me about the woman who each year speaks to him of the daughter she lost in a Christmastime plane crash.

“She feels so alone and I never know what to say to her,” he said as a man tucked a folded dollar bill into his kettle.

“Happy holidays! Thank you! Happy holidays!”

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer.