CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Seven days a week, Jerome White walks from his home on East 55th Street to volunteer at the St. Augustine Hunger Center in Tremont, Cleveland's West Side neighborhood. His walk takes an hour and 15 minutes -- or longer, depending on how hard it's raining or how deep the snow is.
On Thursday, he plans to leave home at 2 a.m. to help prepare eggs and sausage at an all-you-can-eat free breakfast at OLA St. Joseph Center in Tremont. Then he'll go on to St. Augustine's, where he is one of the 1,000 volunteers who prepare and transport 17,000 hot meals to serve poor and homebound people at no cost on Thanksgiving Day.
Just call White an officer in Sister Corita Ambro's Thanksgiving army.
Ambro, a 75-year-old dynamo at St. Augustine, has been supervising the free Thanksgiving feast for 30 of her 40 years at the church.
On Thursday, 300 to 500 people will dine between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. at two halls at St. Augustine Church, but thousands more across Greater Cleveland will enjoy a hot turkey dinner because of preparations that began the first week of October in the basement at St. Augustine's.
That's when the first of 1,000 turkeys went in the six ovens and eight roasters, each of which hold two or three turkeys. Since then, volunteer William "Fish" Hardy has arrived every morning at 5 to turn out 25 turkeys per day. And hunger center cook Sheryl Austin has baked from 120 to 180 pecan, apple and pumpkin pies daily, for a total of 3,000 that will be polished off Thursday.
Several volunteers come daily to debone the turkeys, filling big foil trays with meat to be frozen. "If we didn't start in October, we would never be done in time for Thanksgiving," said Ambro. She works the Thanksgiving prep in with such usual tasks as finding homeless people places to live and overseeing the three free meals St. Augustine's offers every weekday, along with two meals on Saturdays and Sundays.
The week before Thanksgiving, Tom Lisy of Bay Village and Gene Hanzely of Avon Lake, both Knights of Columbus volunteers, put on plastic gloves to pull the meat from just-cooked turkeys. The retirees have been helping prepare for Thanksgiving at St. Augustine's for most of the past decade.
"This is what Knights of Columbus do," said Hanzely, his gloves greasy. "We're supposed to help people."
That day, 21 eighth-graders from St. Ambrose School in Brunswick came to bring cans of food and assemble the cardboard boxes that will hold the foam containers for the hot meals that volunteers will assemble early on the holiday.
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"This teaches our children so much about life -- about the real world," said Sharon Yurick, a retired St. Ambrose teacher who chaperoned the group of 21 kids.
Food prepared at St. Augustine goes to hunger centers, churches and shut-ins from Lorain to East Cleveland -- much of it on Thanksgiving Day. Last week, St. Augustine's volunteer coordinator, Doris Everetts, was glued to a computer logging requests for meals and assigning volunteers. One apartment building on Cedar Avenue requested 75 meals.
On Thursday, volunteers will go to Pilgrim United Church of Christ, a distribution site near St. Augustine', to get maps and boxes of hot turkey dinners to deliver to more than 6,000 individuals who won't spend Thanksgiving with family or friends.
Everetts delegates volunteer tasks from food prep and serving to cleanup. Other volunteers will greet diners at the hunger centers and sit down to eat and talk with them. "That's important too," Everetts said.
Today, Mark "Munch" Bishop, ESPN Cleveland morning host on WKNR AM/850, will broadcast an appeal for food and cash donations throughout the day from St. Augustine as he has since the Rev. Joseph McNulty, the pastor of the church, called him for help 21 years and three radio stations ago.
The collection runs from about 6:30 a.m. until about 5 p.m. at the church, 2486 West 14th St.
"We have businessmen in suits and ties popping the trunks of their Mercedes to people who come in cars that I am amazed can make it down here," Bishop said. Last year, the Thanksgiving Eve round-up yielded about $5,000, 400 turkeys and 2,000 pounds of boxes and cans of food.
Ron Hudson of Mayfield Heights, shot when he was a Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam, will collect food brought to the church today from his wheelchair.
There are many heartfelt moments, Hudson said. "Last year, a guy gave us his last two dollars. He said, 'I'll walk the two miles to work and not take the bus.' That's what happens in Cleveland."
We are a caring city, Ambro agrees. Though she stood in a nearly empty pantry in the hunger center last week, stocked with little more than refried beans and beets, she said she had faith it would be filled after today. "The people of Cleveland are so generous."
"Sister Corita keeps my belly full," said John Jones of Cleveland's West Side, who goes to the St. Augustine hunger center to eat and to volunteer. "I do whatever they need done," said Jones. "It's been wonderful coming here."
The fact that more people throughout the area have little to spend on food hit home with Kevin Thompson. His law firm, Elk & Elk, donates 400 to 500 turkeys a year to St. Augustine. "Last year we saw families with little kids at the hunger center," said Thompson. "Being a family man, it was tough for me to see that."
But Thursday, across the city, whoever orders a meal will get one. Joe Smith, a laid-off cook and a volunteer, promises they'll even have sweet potatoes baked the old-fashioned way.
"We've got the marshmallows ready!"
(Article courtesy of Cleveland.com)
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