Personal Best : Spry Octogenarian Oversees Food Bank

Keeping up with David Kaye can be challenging. The slightly built community activist walks fast, thinks faster and generally doesn’t sit still long enough for any grass to grow under his feet.

On Tuesday, the octogenarian was up at dawn as usual, exercised, then headed over to a Chatsworth food warehouse. Once there, he raced through the storage area, stopping just long enough to answer co-workers’ questions and sift through the pastas, soups and every imaginable pantry staple spilling out of the boxes that line the shelves.

Kaye, who has headed the Encino B’nai B’rith Food Bank program for 24 years, is as comfortable around bakery items and canned goods as a teacher is around books and children.

“Working here is like working in a candy store,” the 81-year-old Northridge resident said of his volunteer work with the Jewish community-service organization. “I never know what’s coming in. What I do know is that everything we have is going to help somebody.”

A brisk walk around the warehouse recently revealed boxes stuffed with everything from marshmallows to matzos. The warehouse also stores school supplies and toys that reach children at Bassett Street Elementary School in Van Nuys, Sepulveda Middle School in North Hills and 38 other schools around the Valley and Los Angeles.

Volunteers arrived early Tuesday at the Nordhoff Street warehouse to load boxes of goods into Lourdes Torres’ car. The community representative from Fernangeles Elementary School in Sun Valley gratefully accepted the food and supplies that she and a helper will distribute this week--as they do once a month--to needy families in the northeast Valley.

“Some of these families can’t even afford a candy bar,” Torres said. “Every box in this car has some candy in it. David makes sure these families’ needs are met.”

Bonnie and John Turner drove in from the San Joaquin Valley to fill their truck with enough food to serve about 600 families in Pacoima and Bakersfield, through their Greater Lighthouse Community Outreach program.

“Dave is truly a humble person,” Bonnie Turner said. “He digs in with the other workers here. He makes us feel like he’s our best friend.”

Kaye jokes that food has been a big part of his life for a long time. The New York native began his career as a fashion photographer, but after moving to Los Angeles in 1950, became a partner in a business that sold day-old bread.

Kaye and Sylvia, his wife of 60 years, slowly expanded the business, eventually supplying food to large supermarket chains around the country.

Kaye said it seemed a natural extension to join the B’nai B’rith’s food bank effort in the mid-1970s.

Through his efforts, the nonsectarian program--which in 1975 gave away a few holiday food baskets--has grown into a huge enterprise that last year provided more than $3.5 million worth of food, blankets and medical and school supplies, among other goods, to about 4,000 people a week.

Kaye lines up national and international retailers to donate the goods, then B’nai B’rith volunteers haul the items to the warehouse. There, representatives from about 100 organizations pick up the food and clothes for distribution.

“In the beginning, I called the companies and persisted and persisted until they came on board,” Kaye said. “The people I work with on this project are of the same mind as me. We want to help.”