Rescue Mission Chief Touched Many With Special Gift of Caring

He’d grab your knee--even during prayer service--and squeeze until you just about buckled to the floor. He was a tall, physical guy who would startle you from behind and flash “that huge smile,” as one man remembered it. “You couldn’t miss it.”

Michael Teague liked you if you were young or old, black, white or polka-dotted, but deep in his heart was a bias. He cared most if you were poor. He ran the Union Rescue Mission--the nation’s largest inner-city rescue mission--with an unyielding commitment to serving his “guests,” as he insisted on calling the drug addicts and homeless men, women and children who stream in by the thousands.

“He had an uncanny knack for knowing what we needed,” said Vernard Hopkins, a former cocaine addict who walked in off the streets 12 years ago and now works on the staff.

Teague was 41 when he collapsed last week at his home in the Hollywood Hills. He died a short while later at a nearby hospital of causes still unknown, leaving those who knew him grasping to explain the loss.

He was a rare man in an unusual place. In the hardscrabble core of skid row, where cynicism breeds like head lice, he inspired words like “magic,” “purity” and “integrity.”

Teague was one of the prominent figures in the community of those who run inner-city missions, a man known nationwide. He ran a multipronged, $18-million-a-year organization that serves 2,500 meals a day while providing beds for 1,000 men, women and children every night. But he never got lost in the balance sheets.

He found it far more rewarding to look after personal details, touches that made life better for people he met once, if at all. During the holiday season, he helped wrap the gifts for the homeless children. He scoured for the best donated clothes.

Those extra efforts were what his staff members and guests remembered Friday, even as they grieved over his death. His obituary was posted on his office door. On Saturday, more than 500 gathered at the First AME Church in Los Angeles for a memorial service.

Flowers and photographs were on display in the mission’s chapel and in the day rooms where homeless men and women can get off the street and sit down and relax.

The usual work got done, but the mood was somber. His influence filtered down to the very bottom, to people far more concerned with finding that next meal than about who was administering the budget.

“Michael Teague was good,” said Elvin Cole, 73, a former shipyard worker who has been homeless for five years. “I never met him. I heard people talk about him. He was good.”

‘He Would Pray for Us Every Day’

Tereso Banuelos, 32, who was so badly hooked on cocaine that he ended up in a hospital emergency room three times, is now in one of the mission’s live-in programs. He also heard the whisperings that went on behind Teague’s back, the words of other addicts, men hardened by the streets.

“I heard he had a list of all of us program people--men and women--and he would pray for us every day,” Banuelos said.

“That was not part of his job, necessarily, but he would still do it. It just really motivates us, knowing he did this on the side.”

Drug-free now for seven months, Banuelos hangs on to that knowledge. He hopes to enroll soon in a two-year college with hopes of becoming a counselor.

Teague paid close attention to details. Jan McDougall, the mission’s chief operations officer, remembers one of his directives on meal service: “Jan, make sure the plates look nice.”

There was not much you could do to dress up that china: white plastic foam. But the food had to be presented well. Teague didn’t want the salad slopping into the spaghetti.

He believed the guests should get the same good service they might receive at a restaurant--because they could not afford a restaurant.

“God just put that type of spirit in him; he gives unconditionally,” said Teague’s surrogate mother, Daisy Coleman, who flew out from Chicago and spent Friday at the mission.

“He grew up without so many things. He just has a love for people. He’s always been attracted to people who need to be rescued.”

Teague was the product of a broken home in Chicago’s tough inner city, Coleman said. His father, a factory worker, raised him alone. Teague graduated cum laude from Bishop University in Dallas, where he majored in accounting, and attended Northern Baptist Theological Seminary outside Chicago.

He came to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and first worked for the Union Rescue Mission in the accounting department.

“His push then was to put [homeless] men in payroll positions,” said Hopkins, 46, who became one of them. Teague stayed a few years, left, and returned in 1994 as chief operations officer, the same year the mission moved into its new five-story, $29-million facility on San Pedro Street.

Teague became president and

chief executive in 1997 and reached out to other mission directors to make sure they were partners, not rivals, in providing care on skid row.

“He moved the whole level of management of these agencies here to a higher level,” said Larry Adamson, head of the Midnight Mission four blocks away. The Union Rescue Mission has a strongly Christian philosophy and the Midnight Mission has a more secular approach, but Teague reached out immediately to collaborate, Adamson said.

Teague tried to bring services to the homeless that were seldom, if ever, found in other missions. In addition to a free medical clinic that opened years ago, in cooperation with UCLA, he opened a free dental office, run by students from USC.

There is a newly expanded computer learning center with Internet access, where willing souls can work to earn a high school equivalency diploma, and a weight room where Teague liked to work out. He would put on his sweat clothes and do bench presses alongside the men in the live-in programs, insisting that everyone call him Mike.

“Michael had such big vision and big dreams,” said McDougall, the chief operations officer, “but the magic of him was how he followed through and brought in the people around him to make it happen. Anything we could do better for the people we serve, that was the mission.”

A lot of weekends he would just drop by, putting in a few extra hours, never asking for thanks, she said.

But on Friday, in his absence, the thanks poured in. All the good deeds were remembered.

Ronald Amber, 58, who lost his home two years ago, came to know Teague only by seeing him around. But Amber knows it was Teague keeping the standards high: mandatory showers, clean beds, good meals of lasagna, stew, chili and beans, various casseroles.

Teague could joke and keep the staff loose, said Chaplain Tino Rodriguez. And, until death took him away, you could count on it.

“I never saw him have an off day,” Rodriguez said. “He was our great leader. In a way, he always will be.”