Meet Woodstock’s Food Pantry in 4 Parts – In Part 1 we Learn About the Economy of Hunger, and the Taboos of Money
GET TO KNOW THE COORDINATOR
“Most of us, I dare say all of us, resent change. Perhaps, at first, we laugh at the stranger in his odd clothes. Then, step two, we begin to fear him. Finally, we hate him.” – Robert Newton Peck
My total job duties took about 2 hours a month as I handed the key to the incoming congregation volunteer each month.
The food pantry system is a huge network of agencies throughout the nation mandated to feed the hungry. In Woodstock, some people felt that the pantry belonged to the congregations. Others, because of my presence in the pantry, felt that it was “mine”. They were both wrong.
The Good Neighbor Food Pantry is an agency member of the Food Bank. To belong to the Food Bank, an agency must be a 501(c)3 organization “serving the ill, needy, or infantile”. Members must either serve free meals or provide free food to the needy, and have proper facilities for storage. The food bank monitors these agencies regularly to make sure the food they handle is both safe and sanitary. Emergency feeding programs (food pantries, soup kitchens, and emergency shelters) which are members of the Food Bank provide monthly statistics on the number of people they serve to both the Food Bank and the State of New York through its Hunger Prevention Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP).
The Food Bank of the Hudson Valley is, itself, an independent 501(c)3 organization. The Food Bank of the Hudson Valley is not a government agency and doesn’t receive government money for daily operations although its staff administers several government food programs providing food for member agencies. The Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP) provides the funds for the Food Bank to supply food and operating support to agencies.
As the coordinator, I was trained, supervised, inspected, evaluated by, and report to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley. Both the Food Bank and I reported to the HPNAP people.
In the beginning, this position had little or no effect on my personal life other than for me to learn how to get to Latham on a regular basis for training classes. Fortunately, (or unfortunately depending on how you saw the situation), I began to take all the pantry classes offered at the Food Bank of Northeastern New York in Latham because the economy tanked and by 2008 I was definitely putting in more than 2 hours each month. I took classes on nutrition, food safety, menu planning, emergency preparedness, fund raising. As I learned things I could use in the pantry, I returned to Woodstock and tried to implement them. After awhile, I felt as if my car could drive itself to the Food Bank.
My new job required that I deal with increasing numbers of shoppers as well the prejudices and traditions of the community congregations. I became intimately involved with the rules surrounding feeding the hungry, the economy of hunger, the biases of people about pantries, and the taboos of money. All these issues revealed themselves incrementally as the numbers escalated in the pantry as people began to need food.
In the pantry I met alcoholics, artists, child abusers, children, crazies, the disabled, druggies, drunks, elderly men and women, hardworking people juggling two and three jobs, homeless, mentally ill, messed-up people, musicians, people battling terminal illness, politicians, schizophrenics, thieves, veterans, Woodstock’s colorful characters, writers, the various ministers, and the church volunteers.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. It was then, and is now, an honor and a pleasure to do this work.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
Fight Hunger 9 Ways
FIGHT HUNGER
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL FOOD PANTRY
Donate Instead of Dumping
-Grow fresh produce and donate it to your local food pantry.
Give Generously
-Donate reusable shopping bags for your pantry volunteers to share with shoppers
Organize a Food Drive in August
-Pantries are traditionally very lean in August.
Volunteer
-There are many jobs to be done at a pantry. Find a pantry needing your skills.
Help Set Up a Closet Pantry
-Churches/Synagogues/schools need small, closet pantries.
Participate in a Backpack Program
-Give food to the child who doesn’t eat on the weekends.
Get Organized
-Clean out your kitchen and donate healthy items to the food pantry.
Be a Friend to a Pantry
-Give a little throughout the year by donating food monthly.
Contact Persons of Influence
-Encourage elected officials to support food pantries.
The Beginning – Part 3: Matthew Gives His Job Away
Hands down, the most enthusiastic congregation was St. John’s. They usually had 4-6 volunteers each week when it was their congregation’s turn and managed to get the most donated food. It helped that St. John’s had the largest congregation of all the churches in town. It also helped that Fr. George always came to the pantry when it was St. John’s turn and enthusiastically brought food.
The Coordinator of the Good Neighbor Food Pantry was Fr. Charlie’s partner, Matthew. Fr. Charlie, the priest at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, got a fancy new job in the Bloomington, Indiana, area.
One of the first things he and Matthew did, even before they spoke about the new job to the congregation, was get new wardrobes, new hairdos, put their houses on the market, and assign the job of pantry coordinator to me.
“Hi Thurman. Come over and sit by me tonight.” Matthew said as we ate the potluck supper after communion one Wednesday evening. Matthew had never, never, never asked me to sit by him. But, what did I know?
“I’d like you to be the next coordinator at the pantry. I have a box of files right here for you. It’s actually very easy. All you do is pass the key from one congregation to the next every month. I’ll call the Food Bank and give them your name.”
I was totally delighted! “Matthew, I’m flattered! Thank you for this opportunity. Do you have any advice for me?”
“Yes, actually, I do. Never give away the key. No matter what. Isn’t this quiche delicious?”
Thanks for reading this post. I hope you found the story so far to be interesting. Looking back on this whole story, I ask myself: If I’d known then what I know now, would I have been so flattered, so ready to say “Yes. Or would I have run off faster than Speedy Gonzalez?’
Then answer to my question is this: “I would’ve stood my ground.”
How Woodstock’s Food Pantry Fit Into This Beginning: Introduction – Part 2
From the start, it was fairly obvious that I was a poor match for the congregation. However, I kept going because of the pet thing. Soon I was volunteering at the local food pantry two months a year when it was St. Gregory’s turn. By 2008, the economy had tanked, the lines at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry were getting longer and Vicar Gigi was going around telling anyone who would listen that “Thurman is out of control over at the pantry” because of the number of people shopping at the pantry and the 3-day supply of food they were getting.
Good Neighbor Food Pantry opened in 1990 and served about two dozen people a week on Thursday mornings. The shoppers, mostly single homeless men, a few local colorful characters such as Jogger John, Rocky, and Grandfather Woodstock, and an occasional family would come into the pantry and pick up a box of cereal, a can of tuna fish, and a can of soup. Other things might be available but weren’t considered staples.
Only one shopper, Marie, focused on the other things. She loved to come in to the pantry and scarf up every “extra” on the shelves. She took the occasional jar of olives, cooking oil, sugar, salt…anything she could find.
Several congregations rotated the management of the pantry: St. John’s Roman Catholic Church, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, Overlook Methodist Church, Shady Methodist Church, Christ Lutheran Church, Woodstock Jewish Congregation, Woodstock Reformed Church, and Palden Sakya.
Each congregation stocked the shelves with what their members donated and the shoppers got what they got. The congregations were content with the arrangement. They took their monthly turn twice yearly, brought in the food, found volunteers from the membership who sat in the pantry visiting with one another for two hours every Thursday morning while serving the hungry.
Thanks for visiting this blog and reading this post. I hope you found it informative and interesting. As the story unfolds in the next post, the “beginning” will move into the story itself. If you read a sentence, paragraph, or even an entire post that you feel is untrue, rest assured that this memoir/blog is very real. Everything written in every post actually happened. It’s my story.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
My True Story About a Woodstock Food Pantry Begins with Hatti Iles, Jay Wenk, and St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church – Introduction:Part 1
“When Bill Clinton left office, we had 31 million people in poverty and now we have 46 million.” – Peter Edelman
I’m going to get run out of town on a rail for telling this story and I don’t care. At my age, what difference does it make anyway? Every word of it’s true. I never could have made this one up in a million years. And, if someone sues…well, so what? Are they going to send a gray haired little old lady to jail? Well, if they do, I’ll just continue to write. I can’t get it all down in one book/blog anyway.
So, here goes. I’m starting at the beginning.
One September evening in 2005, I walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock, NY to hear Jay Wenk, a local activist hero speak. Jay Wenk is even older than I. He fought in World War II and is always up to something. He claims he’s an atheist and yet he’s one of the most spiritual men I’ve met in a long time. Funny about those old atheists. They go after a wrong like a duck on a June bug. He’d been picketing outside the Military Recruiter’s Office in Kingston because he didn’t like how the military recruiters were going after kids at the local high school before they even graduated. And, of course, he ended up in court for it. Jay’s not a pacifist. He just doesn’t approve of the government going after kids. Woodstock loves him for that.
When Jay Wenk has a court date, the room is usually filled with supporters. They also stand in the parking lot outside the court room picketing and otherwise making nuisances of themselves. It’s better than the movies.
So, anyway, he was at St. Gregory’s to give a talk.
I met someone else there: Hatti Iles, also a local celebrity. Hatti, an elegant lady and famous artist who has lived in Woodstock over 40 years, came to the talk and brought her pet dogs, Rupert, a poodle mix, and Willie, a Cairn terrier.
That was it for me. I hadn’t been in an Episcopal Church since 1958 and had long since forgotten how far away from the Episcopalian lens of life I had grown over the years. Never mind. Any church allowing me to take my pet to services had to have some good qualities. Right? I became a regular attendee along with Pork Chop, my 5-pound papillon.
Jay Wenk and Hatti Iles are both very important people in this book. But for them, none of the events I write about would ever have happened.
Thank you for reading this blog. In the next post, we’ll learn how a Woodstock food pantry fit into all of this.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
Why? A True Story Introducing a New Blog About a Food Pantry in Woodstock: Hunger is not a Disease
WHY?
“It takes courage to do what you want.
Other people have a lot of plans for you.
Nobody wants you to do what you want to do.
They want you to go on their trip, but you can do what you want.”
Joseph Campbell
One recent afternoon I was searching through a drawer looking for a pair of scissors when out fell an old photograph. A moment in time. I saw myself as a young mother, in my 20’s, standing with two small toddlers in the garden of a Chinese restaurant in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela…located on the banks of the Orinoco River, the last stop in the interior of a wild country. This was, literally, the end of the road.
An oil camp owned by Gulf Oil was my home for 510 days in 1968-69. What a place to be when so much was happening in the world: Richard Nixon was elected to the Presidency, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Arlo Guthrie debuted his song Alice’s Restaurant, the Vietnam War raged on with a highlight being the My Lai Massacre. I read about all these events every Tuesday evening when a copy of the previous Sunday’s New York Times was delivered to my door.
My children were learning a second language very early. My youngest daughter’s first Spanish words: “Pobre pendejo, pobre pendejo”. Poor bastard, poor bastard. What a vocabulary my little Michele, not yet two, was building as she played with the neighborhood children in the camp.
My husband was hired by Mene Grande when the company purchased a computer. We moved down to this isolated oil camp located deep in the interior of Venezuela. We coexisted with some wild animals, deadly poisonous mapanare snakes, fire ants, and giant frogs among them in a small community composed of ten streets North to South, and ten streets East to West. I learned to live in a country where a uniformed guard with a machine gun pointed at me was the rule of the day…every day. And, there were no outside phone lines.
Questions came to my mind as I looked at this old photo. There I was staring into the face of my past. Now was a long way from my home then located about 50 miles from headhunters in one direction and about 50 miles from a grocery store in the other direction. And, of course, 50 miles in the third direction was Ciudad Bolivar located on the South bank of the Orinoco River. The river, at Ciudad Bolivar, had a gorgeous bridge – the longest one I had ever seen. Driving across the river was interesting because halfway across the bridge it was impossible to see the bank of the river on either end of the bridge.
I know this because, as I was driving across the bridge one morning in my little Volkswagen bug, the right front tire blew out. There I was, in the middle of the bridge with my two toddlers in the car and not another soul crossing the bridge from either side. As I looked back and forth I realized that I couldn’t see the end of the bridge on either side. Realizing that I was totally alone on this bridge with no one coming along and a tire that was blown became a scary moment for me. I just stood there on the bridge beside the car. I didn’t know what to do.
Within a few minutes an officer in a Guardia Nacional car drove up, stopped, and got out of the car pointing a machine gun straight at me.
“Buenas dias, Senora. Como puedo ayudarle?”
“Se rompio mi llanta, Senor Capitan.”
“No se preocupe, Senora.”
And, with that remark, he flagged down the driver of the only car to come along the bridge since my tire blew out. He then made the poor driver get out of his car and change the tire, all the while pointing his machine gun at the man. As soon as the tire was changed, he let the man go and pointed his machine gun at me again.
He then instructed me to get back in my car and drive behind him to a gas station at the end of the bridge where he held his machine gun on the mechanic and made him stop what he was doing and fix my tire.
Then, he pointed his machine gun back at me and had me pay the bill. “Muchisima gracias, Sr. Capitan.” I said, climbed back in my car and quickly drove away to my next stop, a bank where yet another uniformed man held a machine gun pointed at me.
Looking at this old photograph brought many questions to my mind.
The path to the food pantry, for me, was long…maybe spanning over several lifetimes. If that’s the case, I ask myself, then why am I in the door of a pantry weekly now? Why has my path brought me to this place? Not Venezuela in the 1960’s but to Woodstock, New York when I’m over 70? Why not 20 or 30 years ago when I had much more energy for such an ambitious project.
There are also other, much more important questions:
Why is the most abundant country in the world unwilling to feed its hungry, its children, its elderly, its sick?
Why does the act of feeding people bring up such strong emotions in otherwise rational human beings?
Why does a religious community feel it’s necessary to be against feeding the hungry?
Why does the term “unworthy hungry” even exist? What does it mean?
Why do I find myself living in a community where people, my neighbors, cross the street rather than say “hello” to me?
Why do we have no compassion?
Does it matter anyway? Just feed the people. Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Thank you very much for reading this post. Thank you for sharing this amazing journey with me as I relate the events that took place in the Good Neighbor Food Pantry around the fall of the economy of 2008 and after.
Tomorrow’s post will actually begin the story as it happened.
Peace and food for all.
