[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 44 (Thursday, March 9, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H2968-H2972]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE REPUBLICANS' WAR ON KIDS

  Mr. SKAGGS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend to all Members of 
the House a striking series of articles from the Los Angeles Times. 
They provide a poignant rejoinder to current House Republican doctrine 
that we can somehow cut school lunch and breakfast programs without 
really hurting anybody.
  The articles tell the story of the kids from West Covina, CA, a place 
where the local school board decided not to participate in the school 
breakfast program. Let me just give an excerpt.

       By 10 many mornings there is a long line outside the 
     nurse's door. Some children clutch their stomachs, others 
     their heads. In this mostly middle-class bedroom community, 
     these children share a common ailment. They are hungry.
       Phys ed teacher Barbara Davids sometimes fed 12-year-old 
     boy who volunteered to help custodians pick up after lunch so 
     he could salvage garbage scraps.
       [[Page H2969]] Another student got in trouble so he could 
     be sent to the principal's office, where a jar of candies was 
     perched on the desk. ``I'm so hungry. I'm so hungry,'' sobbed 
     the 12-year-old-boy dipping his hand into the jar. * * *

  Mr. Speaker, I include these articles for the Record.
  The articles referred to are as follows:
              [From the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 1994]

                         Going to School Hungry

       As poverty spreads, teachers often see students who have 
     not eaten for days. Malnutrition hinders learning, but 
     resistance to breakfast programs raises question of how far 
     districts should go to help.
       The symptoms have swept through Edgewood Middle School.
       By 10 many mornings there is a long line outside the 
     nurse's door at the West Covina school. Some children clutch 
     their stomachs. Others grasp their heads. In this mostly 
     middle-class bedroom community, these children share a common 
     ailment. They are hungry.
       One boy came into Assistant Principal Amelia Esposito's 
     office last year and confessed to stealing food from a 7-
     Eleven store. ``Every night I go to bed hungry.'' the 13-
     year-old told her, bowing his head. ``There isn't enough 
     food.''
       ``It's scary how many kids here are hungry,'' says 
     Esposito, who believes one in four children comes to class 
     undernourished.
       America's hunger is not the starvation of Somalia or Rwanda 
     that galvanizes global attention: bloated bellies, emaciated 
     arms, failing bodies along roadsides. Hunger here saps people 
     in more subtle ways: families eat only once a day or skip 
     meals for several days, causing chronic malnutrition. It is a 
     problem that many researchers say eased markedly in the 1960s 
     and '70s, but resurfaced with a vengeance in recent years.
       Hunger, they say, afflicts up to 30 million Americans. 
     Twelve million of them are children, many in recession-
     ravaged Southern California.
       Their plight has emerged most publicly in the schools, 
     where teachers delve into their own pockets to feed children 
     whose ability to learn is being crippled by hunger.
       Yet half of California's schools--including all 11 in the 
     West Covina Unified School District--do not offer one ready 
     remedy: breakfast, a federally funded entitlement. 
     Nationally, 37% of the 13.6 million low-income children who 
     get a subsidized lunch also eat a morning meal at school. In 
     some districts, breakfast has been barred or eliminated by 
     school officials who oppose it on philosophical grounds. Many 
     in West Covina, where Christian conservatives dominate the 
     school board, oppose feeding children breakfast at school, 
     calling it anti-family and a usurpation of what should be a 
     parent's responsibility.
       ``I want kids to eat at home with their families,'' said 
     school board President Mike Spence. ``Breakfast at school is 
     just one more thing school districts do rather than allowing 
     parents to take care of their children.''
       A suburb that blossomed from orange groves in the San 
     Gabriel Valley after World War II, West Covina, the ``City of 
     Beautiful Homes,'' is an unlikely haven for hunger. In the 
     1980s, however, teachers watched as lost jobs, an influx of 
     new-comers from the inner city and an increase on single 
     mothers left many students living hand-to-mouth. Although the 
     median family income in West Covina is $51,000, there are 
     pockets of poverty: one in four single mothers lives on less 
     than $14,800 a year.
       Although the shifts in West Covina are hardly unique, the 
     town's emerging economic stratification has made hunger 
     highly visible in the schools.
       The number of students qualifying for free or reduced-price 
     lunches at Edgewood, the district's only middle school, has 
     surged to nearly two-thirds from one-third a decade ago.
       Among them is Cristina Yepez, a soft-spoken 12-year-old 
     with freckles and wide-set blue eyes, who spends some 
     mornings at the school health office complaining of 
     stomachaches. Last year, she says, she got dizzy on the 
     playground, crumpling onto the blacktop at Merced Elementary. 
     She had had no breakfast that day. Dinner the night before 
     was a potato.
       ``A lot of times, we have just break,'' says Cristina, 
     gently combing the silky red hair on her Little Mermaid doll 
     as her family prepares for an evening's meal. ``Sometimes, I 
     get really hungry. But there's nothing more to eat. I go to 
     my friend's house and pretend to play and say: `Oh, can I 
     have something to drink?'''
       Cristina sits down with her mother, Darlene, and sister, 
     Jesseca, 13, for dinner. It is their only meal today. One hot 
     dog each, and water. Darlene Yepez, 38, who is divorced, was 
     sidelined from a forklift job by a back injury but is 
     searching for work. Meanwhile, the family survives on $607 in 
     welfare and $130 in food stamps, which run out halfway 
     through the month. Swallowing her pride, the mother has gone 
     to West Covina's food pantry--but has used her five allowed 
     visits. A few times, the girls have gone up to three days 
     without food, she says, quietly beginning to sob. The last 
     two weeks, she says, they have had one meal.
       Studies show that hungry students are fatigued. They cannot 
     concentrate. They do worse than their peers on standardized 
     tests. Because they are ill twice as often, they miss class 
     more frequently.
       ``They are dazed. You can see it in their eyes.
        Sometimes, their hands tremble,'' says Edgewood teacher 
     Kim Breen, who estimates that three-quarters of her 
     students arrive without eating breakfast. Some do not have 
     the energy to raise their heads from their desks. One girl 
     broke down last year in class, her hands shaking, 
     describing how she had gone all weekend without eating.
       Kathi Jennings sees hunger's toll daily at Edgewood, which 
     has about 1,800 students. Knowing many of them are 
     undernourished, she keeps a choice of rewards for daily tasks 
     on her desk: a baseball card, a small top or a cup of 
     applesauce. Many kids choose food.
       Two guards who patrol Edgewood's playground say one 13-
     year-old girl chases their green security cart, asking for 
     food. Physical education teacher Barbara Davids says she 
     sometimes fed a 12-year-old boy who volunteered to help 
     custodians pick up after lunch so he could salvage garbage 
     scraps.
       Another student got in trouble regularly so he could be 
     sent to the assistant principal's office, where a jar of 
     diabetic candies is perched on her desk. ``I'm so hungry. I'm 
     so hungry,'' sobbed the 12-year-old boy, dipping his hand 
     into the jar and stuffing six candies into his mouth.
       Hunger plagues many U.S. schools. More than a quarter of 
     elementary schoolchildren come to class without breakfast, 
     said Doris Derelian, president of the American Dietetic Assn.
       The Los Angeles Unified School District, like many urban 
     areas, has long served breakfasts so the problem on those 
     campuses is less pronounced.
       Rural and suburban districts are less likely to serve a 
     morning meal. In the Baldwin Park Unified District, nearly 
     half of 16,000 visits to the school nurse last year were tied 
     to hunger. Since then, the district has started offering 
     breakfast at many of its schools.
       The mounting toll in schools mirrors a resurgence in 
     hunger, which studies show was brought under control in the 
     '70s but grew by 50% between 1985 and 1991. Even for 
     Americans with jobs, a growing percentage--now nearly one in 
     five--work full time but earn less than the poverty level.
       Divorce and out-of-wedlock births left children, along with 
     their mothers, the nation's biggest losers. More than one in 
     five children live in poverty, and almost a quarter of low-
     income children in the United States are anemic--a condition 
     linked to inadequate or poor nutrition. Government cuts have 
     not helped: median Aid to Families With Dependent Children 
     benefits for a family of three have dropped 47% since 1970. 
     California food stamp payments average 70 cents a meal, 
     slightly more than half of what the U.S. Department of 
     Agriculture says it takes to get an adequate diet.
       In an effort to assess the extent of hunger in America, the 
     federal government has launched its first tally on 
     malnutrition. Results from the survey of 60,000 households 
     are expected to be released in 1996.
       Recent academic research already has focused on the effects 
     of hunger in the classroom. A 1993 Tufts University study 
     said hunger is stunting cognitive development as lethargic 
     children disengage from learning, and warned that ``our 
     country may be heading for a crisis of enormous 
     proportions.''
       ``Health and nutrition are powerful determinants of 
     educational competence,'' says Ernesto Pollitt, a UC Davis 
     human development professor. His 1993 study found that anemic 
     and iron-deficient toddlers lag behind their peers in mental 
     development by up to 25%. Nonetheless, Pollitt said he is 
     surprised to find that many schools do not serve breakfast 
     and ignore the effects of hunger on the ability to learn.
       A study of 1,023 public schoolchildren in Lawrence, Mass., 
     found that when schools started to serve breakfast, students' 
     standardized test scores rose, and absenteeism and tardiness 
     declined. Math, another study shows, is hardest hit when 
     children are not given a morning meal.
       ``Scientific evidence shows that if you don't do this, you 
     are undermining the very reason for your existence, which is 
     to educate children,'' says J. Larry Brown, director of the 
     Tufts University Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition 
     Policy.
       At Edgewood school, mid-morning is the worst, said science 
     teacher Breen. ``How many eat three meals a day? Two? One?'' 
     Breen asks her class. Most say they eat twice, some only 
     once. It is her annual informal body count on hunger, and the 
     results are more grim each year. Breen estimates a sixth of 
     her students are hungry regularly.
       ``I have to repeat instructions two or three times,'' she 
     says. ``I try to teach them physics, but I can't.'' By second 
     period, a boy in the third row drops his head to his desk. 
     ``I just leave them alone. They aren't going to get it,'' 
     Breen says, her voice full of frustration.
       Just before lunch, a 14-year-old girl rises from her desk 
     and slowly approaches her teacher. She says she has not eaten 
     in two days. Earlier, on the playground, she nearly fainted, 
     dizzy from lack of food. ``Could I have 50 cents?'' she says 
     quietly so the other children can't overhear. ``I'm hungry.'' 
     Breen--who often gets requests for food--fishes out four 
     quarters. The girl, who has not yet been issued a card that 
     will allow her to get a free lunch, still lacks enough money 
     to buy one. She eats what she can: a bag of Doritos from the 
     school vending machine.
       ``I keep my own stuff,'' says the school health clerk, 
     Deborah Paschal, swinging open the office
      cabinet. Sandwiched between 
     [[Page H2970]] the Band-Aids and medicines are peanut butter, 
     crackers and boxes of juice, all purchased with her own 
     money. Counselor Pamela Clausen sometimes gives away her sack 
     lunch. Physical education teacher Barbara Davids occasionally 
     brings in grocery bags of food. When she runs out, or does 
     not have money, she sends children to the cafeteria with a 
     note: ``Feed this kid.''
       Throughout southern California, teachers like Ernie Sanchez 
     are picking up the slack. When he was a second-grade teacher 
     at Vejar Elementary School in Pomona, Sanchez spent the first 
     period each morning making cheese sandwiches for every 
     student. If he had no cheese, he scooped a cup of cereal into 
     a napkin on each child's desk.
       Once, he brought apples to the school, where 99% of the 
     children qualify for free or reduced-price meals. ``All these 
     little hands reached out toward me,'' says Sanchez.
       ``We don't have food sometimes,'' says one 13-year-old 
     Edgewood student, nervously adjusting her glasses. Asked what 
     her mother does, the girl said. ``She stays in the house and 
     watches TV every day.'' Her father? ``He takes drugs. That's 
     why my mom threw him out.''
       But most, Esposito says, suffer because their parents have 
     been laid off, work long hours and leave their children to 
     fend for themselves in the mornings, or work at jobs that 
     barely cover the rent.
       Lisa Drynan, 32, was recently laid off from her 
     administrative job at an engineering firm, the second 
     position she's lost to ``downsizing'' in three years. She is 
     again searching for work. Drynan has gone up to two days at a 
     time without food. Her three boys, Kevin, 3, Kenny, 9, and 
     Keith, 11, who attends Edgewood, often eat once or twice a 
     day. The night before, says Drynan, staring inside her bare 
     refrigerator, her three sons split two hot dogs.
       ``There are many days I don't have anything for them for 
     breakfast,'' she says in her tidy apartment, where the toys 
     are lined up outside the front door. Even though she buys 
     generic brand foods, her $102 in food stamps each month run 
     out after 2\1/2\ weeks. Drynan, who is divorced, has used up 
     her five trips to the West Covina food bank. ``I know food is 
     important. But I know we need a roof over our heads more,'' 
     she says, adding that most of her income goes to the $690-a-
     month rent, bills and collection agencies to pay off 
     thousands of dollars in medical costs owed from one son's 
     head injury.
       ``I'm hungry,'' says Kevin, tugging at his mother's white 
     T-shirt. Drynan has heard that her 3-year-old ventures to 
     neighbors' homes, asking for food. She pulls out a Popsicle--
     the last bit of food in her freezer--and gives it to Kevin, 
     who consumes the treat in seconds.
       Kenny, a skinny boy with big brown eyes, laments not having 
     had his favorite food, pork chops, since his birthday in 
     March. At school, he says ``in the mornings, I get real 
     hungry.'' By 10:30, he begins a daily lunchtime countdown, 
     eyes focused on the classroom clock. Other children sit
      down after morning recess for snack time--a treat from home. 
     ``They read us a story, or we do our work. I just have to 
     work. I don't have a snack,'' Kenny says quietly. ``I get 
     hungry when I look at them.
       Drynan knows hunger afflicts other families in her 
     neighborhood, even those in which the parents have jobs. When 
     Drynan sent her children for a sleep-over to Susie Ballard's 
     house across the street, they were told to eat supper at 
     their own home, then come over.
       Ballard, 38, whose daughter Kristin attends Edgewood, 
     explains that although she works, she cannot put three meals 
     on the table for her own three children, much less visitors. 
     Ballard, whose marriage broke up two years ago, lost her 
     long-time job as a pizza company training manager. Work as a 
     cleaning lady barely covers the rent. Half the month, there 
     is no breakfast. Ballard stretches a pack of spaghetti into 
     three meals, thinning down the red sauce with cans of water.
       ``There are nights I tell the kids: `I'm not hungry. You 
     eat.''' says Ballard, nervously smoothing the lace doily on 
     the apartment's living room table. She gives the kids Kool-
     Aid to fill their bellies. Fresh fruit, vegetables and coffee 
     are luxuries of the past.
       ``I tell them: `If someone offers you a free meal, take it, 
     take it.' I used to go to bed crying every night. I feel a 
     failure to them. I ask: How can they look up to me?''
       Kristin, 13, is curled up in a chair in the corner of the 
     sparsely furnished but immaculate apartment. ``If the food 
     was there, I would eat more,'' she says shyly.
       Anti-hunger advocates are waging a coordinated, nationwide 
     campaign in a school-to-school battle to get the tens of 
     thousands of schools without breakfast programs to sign up. 
     Without breakfast in schools, the $16 billion California 
     spends on elementary and high school education may be wasted 
     money, Assemblywoman Gwen Moore warned in a January letter to 
     colleagues, prodding them to push the program in their 
     districts. Twenty-one states--including New York and Texas--
     now mandate that all or some of their schools serve 
     breakfast. Bills to make breakfast mandatory in California 
     schools have failed, partly because they are viewed by some 
     legislators as coddling immigrant children.
       In La Habra, a recently implemented breakfast program has 
     made teaching more productive. Morning stomachaches used to 
     afflict half her students daily, said Maria Vigil, a Las 
     Lomas elementary kindergarten teacher. ``They were all 
     nauseous'' and lethargic, she said. Her office brimming with 
     more than a dozen hungry children by mid-morning, Las Lomas 
     Principal Mary Jo Anderson
      found that for 10% of the students, school lunch was their 
     only solid meal. ``I their tummies hurt, their brains 
     can't work.'' Anderson says. School breakfast she adds, 
     resulted in a 95% drop in disciplinary problems. ``They 
     are calm, happy. They aren't angry. They aren't hurting. 
     It's like a miracle.''
       ``Teacher! I am going to eat!'' children yell at Vigil as 
     they spill out of yellow school buses. Sandra Andrade. 5, 
     races from the parking lot, grabs her green meal ticket, then 
     rushes to the wire screen window, waiting impatiently for her 
     tray of milk, juice, cereal and string cheese. Unemployed 
     father Roberto Andrade--who some days can't scrounge up the 
     gas money to search for work--hovers over the school 
     breakfast tables, where four of his children who attend Las 
     Lomas share their food with his other three younger children. 
     ``Without this, they might not eat some days,'' says the 
     handyman. Three-year-old Eduardo devours a packet of graham 
     crackers with his sister Sandra.
       The focus on food is everywhere. As soon as class starts in 
     Vigil's Room 6, she notices that 6-year-old Jonathan Quintana 
     is irritable and crying. Vigil's hand dives into a desk 
     drawer and pulls out a bag of crackers: ``Let's get you a 
     little cereal, OK?''
       Jonathan is ushered to a table, seated next to his teddy 
     bear, and given cereal, juice, milk and more crackers. The 
     lesson quickly continues. Jonathan's sobs become more 
     infrequent. He sniffles. By 9, he is seated with the other 
     students, at work on lessons about the calendar and the 
     weather.
       As Vigil offers each child a animal cracker from a large 
     jar. Jonathan cheerfully plays with Legos. Even as lunchtime 
     approaches, children attentively listen to Vigil's rendition 
     of ``The Three Bears,'' jostling to see the book's pictures. 
     Later, Alberto Cueva. 5, savors his lunch--a burrito, 
     followed by corn and milk--before his half day of school 
     ends.
       ``Sometimes, we eat at night,'' says the boy, urgently 
     shoveling the burrito into his tiny mouth. ``Sometimes we 
     don't.''
                                                                    ____

           Schools Defend Decision Against Offering Breakfast

       Although school breakfast programs could help many 
     children, there are many reasons why schools do not offer a 
     morning meal.
       Logistic barriers can be a nightmare, said Wanda Grant, 
     food services director for El Monte City School District. Her 
     district, which serves breakfast at its 18 schools, had to 
     shuffle bus schedules, buy trucks to haul more food supplies 
     and deal with water heaters that could not handle bigger 
     dishwashing loads. Food service directors, principals and 
     custodians usually do not jump at the chance to do more work 
     for the same pay.
       However, schools that want to offer breakfast find a way. 
     When the Riverside Unified School District could not juggle 
     bus schedules, it offered breakfast pizza and pancakes on the 
     school bus.
       Often, philosophical objections are the bigger obstacle. 
     Many people believe parents, not taxpayers, should provide 
     something as basic as breakfast for their children. If 
     schools take on more duties--offering sex and drug education, 
     for example--won't that encourage parents to abdicate more 
     responsibilities?
       In a case that attracted widespread attention, the Meriden, 
     Conn., school board, arguing that children should eat at home 
     with their families, repeatedly voted down school breakfast 
     programs from 1990 to 1993--flouting a 1992 school breakfast 
     state mandate until there were sued by the state attorney 
     general.
       A survey this year by the California Department of 
     Education, which allocated only a third of the $3 million in 
     breakfast start-up grants last year because of a dearth of 
     applicants, found that many principals and superintendents 
     voiced philosophical objections to breakfast programs. ``The 
     parents have some responsibility for these kids. It's not the 
     schools' job to be all things to all people,'' one principal 
     wrote.
       Since the 1980s, Shyrl L. Dougherty, the nutrition services 
     director for Montebello Unified, has prodded four of 26 
     schools balking at serving breakfast. In one school, 98% of 
     the children would qualify for free or reduced-cost morning 
     meals. ``How much are we supposed to do for families?'' one 
     principal protested to Dougherty.
       Only about a tenth of students in Orange County's second-
     largest district, Garden Grove Unified, get free or reduced-
     price breakfasts, although half qualify.
       ``What's next? Are we going to provide housing for these 
     people too?'' one principal asked the district's food 
     services director, Karen Papilli.
       In the West Covina Unified School District, many 
     administrators and teachers believe the decision not to offer 
     breakfast is rooted in conservative attitudes. The school 
     board begins its meetings with Christian prayer.
       ``We have a conservative school board. They are very 
     concerned about the role of the school,'' said Mary J. 
     Herbener, the district's child welfare and attendance 
     supervisor. Merced Elementary Principal Janet Swanson said: 
     ``Breakfast is a hot potato. It's a political issue.''
       Edgewood Middle School Assistant Principal Amelia Esposito 
     said she has pushed for breakfast for three years. ``This 
     board is stuck in the '60s. Lunch is OK, but breakfast is 
     controversial.''
       [[Page H2971]] Anthony Reymann, who calls himself the 
     board's lone liberal, sizes up his colleagues' reaction to a 
     breakfast program: ``They will say: `Ultimately God put 
     parents on this earth to take care of their children. By God, 
     that is what they should be doing.'''
       The board's conservative president, Mike Spence, said: 
     ``The government is trying to usurp the responsibilities of 
     the parent. There is a trend to take over aspects of what the 
     family does.''
       ``Schools need to educate,'' said Susan Langley, the West 
     Covina School District Council-PTA president. She says 
     parents should turn elsewhere for food assistance. ``We are 
     really big on self-help.'' Some teachers are skeptical as 
     well. One told Esposito: ``If they (parents) weren't on 
     drugs, their kids wouldn't be hungry.
       Since bringing in breakfast last year at Santa Ana's Pio 
     Pico Elementary School, the droves of hungry children who 
     arrived at Principal Judy Magsaysay's office sick with hunger 
     in the morning have disappeared. Teachers are astounded at 
     the difference in the classroom: 10 to 11:30 a.m., once dead 
     time, has become a fertile learning period.
       Magsaysay said she knows the difference the meals make when 
     she watches students return from month-long vacations visibly 
     thinner. Twenty-five children line up against the cafeteria's 
     outer wall by 6:45 a.m. for breakfast. Sometimes the 
     cafeteria lady runs late. When she finally swings open the 
     door, the children clap and cheer.
                                                                    ____

                     The Food Angel of 42nd Street

       Mae Raines loads an old pickup with donated food and hands 
     it out in some of the city's poorest areas. `When I can ease 
     someone's pain, I feel good,' she says.
       To the children running excitedly after her rusty blue 1978 
     Dodge pickup for a piece of bread, or an orange, she is 
     Mother Raines or the Muffin Lady.
       Mae Raines' food truck pulls to a stop in South-Central Los 
     Angeles and she begins the task of easing hunger. ``A lot of 
     kids don't know what a snack or lunch is,'' says Mae, who 
     watches some children devour whole bags of bread. Women 
     sometimes sob when she puts food in their hands. Men bow 
     their heads and say thanks.
       At 71, when most are quietly enjoying their golden years, 
     Mae spends her time hauling truckloads of food to some of the 
     most dangerous streets in Los Angeles, places many people in 
     the City of Angels avoid. In her mind, she is simply a good 
     Christian. ``God said: Take care of the poor and the widows. 
     I do what the Word says,'' says Mae, a widow herself. To her 
     neighbors, she is the food angel of 42nd Street.
       On a crisp autumn morning with wisps of clouds in the sky, 
     Mae arrives at the Los Angeles wholesale produce market's 
     ``charity dock,'' where she gets donations of fruits, 
     vegetables and bread. An ample woman, Mae--clad in flowing 
     purple culottes, black high-top sneakers and a royal blue 
     beret covering salt-and-pepper hair--points two of her foster 
     sons at boxes of food to load. The boys pile the scratched 
     and scarred Dodge with loaves of bread, sweet corn, oranges, 
     pumpkins, even doughnuts. And they never forget an item 
     children in her neighborhood south of the Coliseum count on 
     May to bring; English muffins.
       ``We need radishes, four boxes,'' Mae prods her foster son, 
     Donell.
       An hour later, Mae and the children scramble into the cab 
     of the truck. The squeaky doors clang shut. She grasps her 
     window and pushes it down by hand. Peering out the shattered 
     windshield, she eases away from the concrete loading dock, 
     heading south, through the warehouse district near Downtown, 
     over two railroad tracks, past rubble-strewn lots and 
     graffiti-marred walls, zigzagging
      into the heart of the city.
       Rolling past low-slung houses, Mae's food wagon brakes at 
     her first stop. Most who converge on her truck are very old 
     or very young.
       One 4-year-old boy, Minor Beli, can barely believe it when 
     Mae holds out a box of doughnuts. ``Do you want it?'' she 
     asks. For a moment, Minor hesitates, then reaches out, 
     tightly grasping the box. His eyes look lovingly at the 
     treat, then at Mae. Minor's mother, Ana Beli, 27, says she 
     must often limit how much her children eat to stretch their 
     food to the end of the month. ``When I pay the rent, there is 
     little left,'' she says.
       The Belis pay $350 a month for a room in a house they share 
     with another family. Her husband works for minimum wage as a 
     garment worker. Last night, she says, Minor, 2-year-old 
     Jennifer and Angel, 7 months, ate one egg each.
       Mary Lou Ellis, an 83-year-old with tufts of gray hair 
     peeking out from under her cap, hobbles down the block to 
     Mae's truck. Mae thrusts a bag of bread, radishes and 
     tomatoes into trembling hands. ``Oh lordy, lordy. Thank you! 
     Thank you!'' the woman says, beaming at Mae.
       The former Lockheed Corp. riveter and housecleaner says 
     that there often isn't enough food, so she skips meals. The 
     rent eats up $400 of her $645 Social Security check. 
     Utilities consume most of the rest. Someone swindled her out 
     of her meager retirement savings, she says. Her house was 
     emptied of furniture in a recent break-in. She leans heavily 
     on her brown cane and stares hard at the ground. ``I've never 
     lived like this,'' she says, confessing to no one in 
     particular. ``I feel like taking a gun and shooting my brains 
     out.''
       The stooped woman hobbles away. But as word gets out, her 
     neighbors emerge from their homes, creating a crowd. ``Are 
     you selling this?'' one woman asks. Mae turns to her with a 
     warm smile. ``No,'' she says. ``I'm giving it away.''
       ``Oh! There's my girl,'' Mary Washington squeals at Mae, 
     who has helped her ever since she fell and broke her neck a 
     decade ago. A former cook and janitor, she points to a long 
     surgical scar that runs the length of her neck. Her head 
     tilts to the side. Ever since the accident, seizures have 
     made it hard to keep a job.
       ``She'll dress you. She'll feed you,'' she says, striking 
     Mae's shoulder as her friend fills a bag with radishes and 
     corn. Each month, she tries to survive on $212 in welfare--
     which lets her rent a room in a house--and $103 in food 
     stamps. Collecting cans and bottles from trash bins brings in 
     $15 more, which busy some food for the end of the month.

                           *   *   *   *   *

       Two years ago, at 69, Mae took in a 2-day-old crack baby 
     for a year. She has had 10 foster children over the years, 
     and also has taken in 10 other neighborhood children off and 
     on, occasionally sleeping on the living room window seat to 
     accommodate them.
       Sometimes, the tough grandmother feels fear on her food 
     runs. Once, she had driven her truck Downtown to Skid Row, 
     parked and begun laying out pans of homemade rice, chicken 
     wings, cheese toast and cobbler. Chris and Cee were at her 
     side, wrapping forks and spoons in napkins. A group of 
     homeless men gathered around her menacingly. Mae quickly 
     solicited one of the ragged men to help her. ``You can come 
     here anytime.'' he said, staring down the others. ``I 
     guarantee no one will take advantage of you and your 
     children.'' She fed 200 that day.
       Mae's neighborhood is rough, too. In recent years, two 
     neighbors' sons--neither one in gangs--were killed in drive-
     bys, shot through the back and neck. One an 18-year-old boy, 
     was buried in a grave site Mae had purchased for herself The 
     Menlo Avenue School one block from her home has a ``gunfire 
     evacuation plan.'' Its schoolyard has been sprayed with 
     bullets 10 times in the past year and a half, once just as 
     kindergarten was letting out, says Principal Arthur W. 
     Chandler. Police helicopters often hover overhead, tracking 
     clashes among the 18th Street Gang, the Rolling 40 Crips and 
     increasingly violent tagging groups such as the Dirty Old 
     Men.
       Poverty is another mounting concern. Part of Mae's route 
     traverses an area of South-Central in which more than one in 
     four residents didn't have the resources to feed themselves 
     the entire month, according to a UCLA study.
       Since the 1980s, as a growing tide of poverty has left more 
     people hungry, the efforts of nonprofit groups and 
     individuals have become increasingly critical in curbing 
     hunger's toll. ``The government cannot do it all. If it 
     weren't for the private sector, the tragedy would be, I 
     think, unbelievable,'' says Roy B. McKeown, president of 
     World Opportunities. Requests from people like Mae, he says, 
     have become more urgent in recent years as joblessness in the 
     inner cities has skyrocketed.
       Mae's drive through this hungry landscape often includes a 
     stop at her neighborhood Unocal gas station. ``C'mon baby,'' 
     she beckons to a man furiously washing windshields one recent 
     day. Word spreads like wildfire down the street. Soon, the 
     truck is surrounded by homeless women and men, many of whom 
     have known Mae for years. She plucks oranges, apples and 
     bread from boxes around the rim of the truck.
       One bag goes to Tyrone Richardson, a 32-year-old unemployed 
     construction worker. Taking the food, he fishes a wadded-up 
     dollar bill from his pants. He stuffs it into Mae's shirt 
     pocket. ``This will help you get gas to help others. 
     Sometimes I don't have a dime. Today I do.'' he says. The 
     gift amounts to half of his total assets. Mae vehemently 
     refuses the money. But, cradling a watermelon
      in his arm, he walks away, saying only, ``She got a good 
     heart.''
       ``This is what we do,'' Mae says simply, stuffing more 
     plastic bags with food.
       ``What's the problem? Tell me?'' Mae quietly asks Sheree 
     Wilson, 31, who has been homeless for three months and was 
     headed to Jack-in-the-Box to eat a free packet of jelly when 
     she noticed Mae's truck.
       ``This is my baby,'' the woman says, pulling from her 
     jacket a crumpled photograph of her 1-year-old boy, Joshua, 
     beaming from his crib. She stops peeling her orange and 
     begins to sob, explaining that she left the baby with her 
     mother because she is addicted to crack and ``going crazy.''
       She says her best friend, who was on the streets with her, 
     was recently arrested for prostitution and drug dealing. Now 
     that she's alone, the streets are wildly dangerous. She's not 
     sure how to get out, or if she has the will to leave crack 
     behind.
       Mae pulls out a small coin purse, counts out four quarters. 
     Then, standing by her truck, Mae lays her hand on the woman's 
     chest and leads her in prayer. ``You are gonna be all right. 
     Nothing is too hard,'' she urges.
       ``I have faith.'' Sheree says, lovingly fingering the 
     picture of her son. ``I just went the other way.''
       Mae pulls out of the station, leaving behind a destitute 
     crowd on the blacktop, all of them munching apples.
       It's not long before Mae happens upon Rosa Ramirez, 20, 
     with her two children. Marbella 
     [[Page H2972]] Heredia, 1, and Jose Heredia, 2. Her husband, 
     she explains, gets sporadic work in the garment industry. Now 
     things are slow and he brings home as little as $50 a week. 
     Marbella virtually inhales an orange she grasps in her tiny 
     right hand. The juice cascades down her chin, trickling onto 
     her white sweater. ``I try to feed them something every day. 
     Sometimes, it's just rice and beans,'' she says.
       Mae prepares to leave, but Jose's brown eyes look 
     pleadingly at her as he stuffs the orange into his mouth. 
     ``More?'' he asks.
       Mae's last stop of the day is Tarlee McCrady's house on 
     Raymond Avenue. Mae peers inside the two-story house from her 
     truck and, seeing no sign of life, drives on. But a loud 
     pleading wail comes from behind the front door: ``I'm here! 
     I'm here!''
       Mae parks in the shade. ``You want a pumpkin?'' she asks. 
     The woman, who has sweptback gray hair, runs out and nods.
       A 65-year-old living on Social Security, she met Mae in 
     church nearly two decades ago. When her body is up to it, she 
     goes out on the truck with Mae, helping distribute food. 
     Today, she says, she is fretting over how to pay her water 
     bill. She, too, gets much of her sustenance from Mae.
       If not for the help, she says, ``I'd be down on Skid Row. 
     What else would I do?''
       ``She doesn't do a lot of talking. But she does a whole lot 
     of doing,'' says Brenda White, who works at Church of the 
     Harvest, which Mae attends. She says she's seen Mae take a 
     bed out of her house--even the food in her own refrigerator--
     and give it away. Brenda, who has two daughters, was divorced 
     six years ago and had a breakdown, leaving her temporarily 
     unable to work at her hair salon. She was too embarrassed to 
     ask for help from relatives. Mae didn't need prodding. Every 
     other week, she began to bring bags of food.
       In addition to her Social Security, Mae receives a modest 
     income from caring for her foster children. Everything that's 
     left after paying bills--about $100 a month--is put in a coin 
     purse and slowly given out to people in need. The only hand-
     out she's taken from the government is some cheese.
       ``People have millions of dollars, they die, and their 
     children fuss over it. I give my surplus money for 
     children,'' she says.
       Mae, nearing exhaustion, steers her truck home.
       Wheeling into her driveway, Mae still has a third of the 
     food. ``Hi, Mother Raines!'' a little girl from next door 
     cries, waving. Other neighbors drop by. ``What kind of bread 
     you need? Brown bread? White bread? Your grandma feel better 
     today?'' Mae asks Erick, 8. He nods. Mae knows that many 
     neighbors skip some meals each day but are too embarrassed to 
     ask for food. ``I know which ones won't come out,'' she says. 
     ``Some people would rather die than ask for help.'' For 
     these, she packs boxes, which Donell begins delivering on 
     people's stoops.
       ``I work in the shadows of an inner city overrun by gangs 
     and riotous living. But when I can ease someone's pain, or 
     can encourage them, I feel good,'' Mae says. ``If I never do 
     anything for the community I live in, why am I here? I don't 
     want to hear the baby next door cry from lack of milk or see 
     a child walk by without shoes.
       ``It's not hopeless. Everyone isn't extending themselves.''
       On Thanksgiving Day, Mae says, she will bake 17 traditional 
     dishes. In the morning, her natural and foster children will 
     gather, and read prayers. ``Thanksgiving is for my family,'' 
     Mae says, closing her front gate as the last of the food is 
     dispensed and dusk approaches. That said, Mae concedes that 
     last year, she gathered her leftovers at the end of the day, 
     some paper plates and plastic silverware and summoned her 
     children to help. She went to the corner of her street and 
     served food to the thankful until every crumb was gone.
                                                                    ____

                                Epilogue

       Three weeks after this series ran, the West Covina Unified 
     school board voted to institute a government-subsidized 
     breakfast program at Edgewood Middle School and at seven of 
     its elementary schools, thus assuring breakfast--and a chance 
     to learn unimpeded by hunger--to thousands of children.
       West Covina's move to join the program was part of a rush 
     by 60 schools in California. Thirty-three of these schools 
     were in Southern California. They were among a group of 193 
     Southland schools that the state says should offer breakfast 
     because a high proportion of their students are low income, 
     but did not do so for a variety of reasons.
       The Times reported on these schools and their struggles 
     over whether to serve breakfast in a follow up to the series 
     on Dec. 12.
       Back at Edgewood, donations poured in. More than $22,500 
     had been pledged or delivered by Dec. 13. A citizens group, 
     formed spontaneously after the series to fight hunger in West 
     Covina Unified schools, used the money to serve breakfast to 
     children until the government-funded breakfast could begin.
       West Covina residents were not the only ones moved to get 
     involved. One donor offered a secondhand truck to Mae Raines, 
     the food angel of 42nd street, to replace her old clunker. 
     Several churches and temples read the story about ``the 
     Muffin Lady'' during weekend services. At the Ahavat Zion 
     Messianic Synagogue, 40 worshippers passed a plate and 
     collected $307 for Raines. Then, they planned a food drive.
       ``It really made us look in the mirror and say: `We aren't 
     doing enough','' said Ron Bernard, synagogue board president.
       Others pledged $12,000 to the Charity Dock, an innovative 
     hunger program at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market.
       Hundreds of callers flooded the newspaper with offers of 
     help for some of the people profiled in the series. Many 
     called crying, saying they wanted to know how they could help 
     a food pantry, a food drive, or assist a family in need.
       ``My husband is ill on life support. And I'm crippled from 
     arthritis.'' wrote Majorie B. Walker of Los Angeles in 
     halting handwriting. ``But never have we went without food.'' 
     She sent $50 to one family profiled in the series.
       ``My wife and I found your article to be a rude awakening 
     to a problem which we did not know existed.'' wrote Bob J. 
     Ratledge of Palm Desert, who fired off a letter to the West 
     Covina Unified school board urging that it adopt a breakfast 
     program. Other letters to the board were more blunt, 
     threatening a recall if action wasn't taken. Some who sent 
     checks apologized that they couldn't afford to send more. 
     Others said they sat their children down and read them the 
     stories of hunger.
       Lisa Drynan, who was profiled with her three young sons, 
     received more than 200 calls from readers offering to help. 
     She said the assistance promised to make this the best 
     holiday season ever for her children.
       The story also sparked calls from hungry people seeking 
     food assistance. At the Southern California Interfaith Hunger 
     Coalition, a stream of people called to ask how they could 
     apply for food stamps. The Self-Help and Resource Exchange--a 
     program that helps people pool their resources to buy 
     wholesome food at half the retail cost--has also seen an 
     uptick in activity.
       And at the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank, which struggles 
     to get a decent share of corporate salvage food products to 
     feed the hungry, this series helped focus new attention 
     nationwide on the difficulties private efforts are 
     encountering in stemming hunger. Pointing to subsequent 
     national TV news and magazine stories touching on the issue, 
     executive director Doris Bloch said, ``these stories have 
     built a fire under people.''
     

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