Come High Water, These Ladies Really Cook

Where there’s an empty stomach, these ladies will fill it come downpour, deluge or dark of night.

Pancakes for three or four dozen of those nice kids from the Red Cross? Not a problem. So don’t just stand there--go find the syrup!

Spaghetti and meat sauce for who-knows-how-many poor wet souls who were washed out of their homes? Well, where’s the spatula? You can’t make meat sauce without a spatula!

For six days last week they showed up in the big church kitchen at 6 a.m. to pour the batter and scoop the butter and scramble the eggs that fed the folks who fled the flood. After that, they would start on sandwiches for lunch and deep tubs of casserole for dinner, plus a couple of carloads of oatmeal-raisin cookies and some peach cobbler thrown in for good measure.

A few times each day, trucks would haul the bounty from the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Ventura to emergency shelters in Port Hueneme and Casitas Springs. The food would fuel flagging Red Cross volunteers and the hundred-odd people who had to flee the storms.

In the kitchen, the ladies are a perpetual-motion machine with human parts, a beautiful thing to watch as they slice, dice, chop and chat.

One minute, there’s sweeping and washing and clattering through cupboards. The next, there’s a spontaneous assembly line as boiled hot dogs are thrown into buns, strips of foil are cut, the dogs are wrapped and the foil ends are twisted tight--just so.

Someone stops by, reminding them to save a bunch of those huge soup cans to tie behind the old firetruck for this weekend’s wedding.

Not a problem! You bet!

Like a short-order blackjack dealer, Lita Masters flips American cheese onto so many slices of bread.

“You want a slice of Swiss in the middle of two yellows?” she asks.

Hanna Adam doesn’t hesitate: “No, no, no. For grilled cheese, all yellow.”

The two can tell you something about food.

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At 83, Lita has spent much of her life in restaurants.

She ran a cocktail lounge in downtown Los Angeles, the food concessions at the Riviera Country Club and a place on Wilshire called Lita’s Chicken Dinners--”the best little chicken house in the world.” Shirley Temple came in every week for the Southern-fried chicken with hush puppies.

Hanna used to cook single-handedly for the 86 boys of the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity at Iowa State. The mother-in-law of the church’s pastor, Rev. Marvin Wray, she whips up occasional church banquets--a far cry from the hunger she knew on the streets of Europe during the war.

On this particular day, Hanna and Lita and three or four other church members are in a subdued frenzy. The shelters had closed, so now all they had to do was make lunch for the volunteers--25 hot dogs and 25 grilled cheese sandwiches. And then dinner, and then breakfast.

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They do not draw their recipes from some book of great disaster dinners.

“You just decide what’s nutritious and good and what’ll keep people working,” said Pat Wikoff, the animated woman leading the effort.

An incorrigible volunteer, Pat said this was her first “mass feeding.” She did child care in Red Cross shelters after the Northridge earthquake, the San Francisco earthquake and the hurricane that struck Kauai.

“I ate cold food, took ice-cold showers and lost 6 pounds,” she said.

That isn’t a risk here. Tonight’s casserole: 10 pounds of hamburger, half a dozen onions, three giant bags of Tater Tots, two industrial-size cans of cream of mushroom soup and lots of shredded cheddar.

Tomorrow’s breakfast will be highlighted, as usual, by Hanna’s cinnamon buns: big, gooey concoctions she makes after-hours at home, where she has more room to roll out the dough.

A hardy 77, Hanna is quick to recall that life has not always been so sweet.

She lifts her pant leg to show a scar on her calf. When she was a starving refugee, a Russian soldier kicked her there with a steel-toed boot.

“I was ready to shoot my three children and myself,” she says in her thick German accent. “If I weren’t a Christian, I would have.”

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Chopping an onion with surgical precision, retired pediatrician Mary Kimura also reflected on bad times. When she was a teenager, she and her family were shipped to an internment camp in Wyoming.

“Of course at that age, it was an exciting adventure,” she said. “I’d never been away from the Bay Area before, and then all of a sudden we’re at Santa Anita racetrack, and then at Hart Mountain. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise.”

The rush to prepare lunch subsides. The onions Mary chopped will top hot dogs for whoever chooses. Catsup has been sent along too; the consensus is that some people inexplicably like catsup on their hot dogs. Plans are being laid for tonight: one casserole or two?

It’s noon and some of the ladies have been banging pans around for six hours. After a phone call from the Red Cross, Pat asks whether they can show up if it rains hard this weekend.

They answer as one: You bet! Sure can!