How We Got Started

“No money for food”

50 years ago, as Christmas neared, a young door-to-door salesman named Al Fellinger called on a family in a basement apartment in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago. His mission for the utility company that employed him was to make sure that electrical appliances were in good working order. As Fellinger remembers it:

“An elderly woman with a disheveled appearance and a heavy Eastern European accent opened the door. I explained why I was there and inquired about her appliances. Specifically, I asked if she’d mind if I checked her refrigerator. She began to cry.”

The exchange that followed led to the creation of a Chicago charity with a unique yet simple idea: Provide a good Christmas dinner and a cluster of appropriate gifts to families in Chicago who otherwise wouldn’t have much of a Christmas at all. The charity was called Santa for the Very Poor. Fellinger continues:

“Through her tears she told me that it didn’t matter if her refrigerator worked. I asked why and she said, ‘No money to buy food to put in it.’ Then she repeated ’No money for food.’ She went on to say that she used her refrigerator only to store dishes.”

When Fellinger left he couldn’t get those words out of his mind—“no money to buy food.” He went to a nearby grocery store, bought twenty dollars’ worth of food—enough, in 1956, to fill several bags, and returned to the woman in her small apartment. Again she cried. “Man of mercy!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around him, “man of mercy!”

Later he told the story to his good friend Bob Erzinger. Together they contemplated how many other empty refrigerators there might be in Chicago that Christmas. Hundreds? Thousands? And was there a way to put something in them?

The result of that conversation, Santa for the Very Poor, now raises over $125,000 a year and brings to thousands of Chicagoans a good Christmas dinner and an array of Christmas gifts every holiday season. Another result of that conversation is an unusual, and perhaps unique, operating principle: every penny contributed goes toward those Christmas bundles; there are no administrative costs; the organization’s 48 “directors” themselves pay for the stamps on the solicitation mailings and all other such expenses.

The directors—some young and in business and the arts, some retired--are an active bunch. Each is expected to solicit money, to give money, and to participate in two remarkable labor-intensive events that take place every December.

The first of these is called “toy packing.” At 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning a couple of weeks before Christmas (December 9 this year), directors, together with families and friends—around a hundred people in all, ages eight to eighty--assemble in the auditorium of a church school on the near North side. When they arrive the auditorium is empty. Soon trucks start to pull up loaded with hundreds of boxes, each marked for a particular age group starting with 1-3 and moving up to adults.

At this point a kind of self-deployment takes place. Nobody gives orders or makes assignments. A couple of dozen people form a hand-to-hand line from the trucks to the auditorium, delivering boxes to their indicated age groups. Others, armed with box cutters, open the boxes and organize their contents—here an array of dolls, there a pile of small rubber footballs and soccer balls, across the room bins of mittens, scarves, ski caps, playing cards. In less than an hour the sides of the room are piled high with toys, games, books, and clothing organized by age group. Many of the items have been contributed free of charge, others bought from minority-owned companies.

Now 850 large shopping bags, contributed by Crate & Barrel, somehow appear in the center of the room. Directors have been formed into teams, each team responsible for 80 bags which now must be numbered with magic markers and lined up, standing open, in the middle of the room. And finally, with the floor covered with 850 open bags, the actual act of “toy packing” begins.

Each team has a list of families, gathered from churches or social work organizations, with the ages and genders of each family member specified. For example, family number 72 might consist of a mother, a girl (13), a boy (10), and a girl (4). Single-parent families are common. A director (or her husband or child or friend) will take bag #72 around the room, filling it with something appropriate for each member of that family. For some inexplicable reason, directors’ children around 10 or 12 are particularly swift at filling the bags. And these children seem to get particular satisfaction out of doing something for kids who have so much less than they do themselves.

The auditorium now throbs with activity as people scurry about, bags in hand, selecting items family by family. In less than an hour the 850 shopping bags are full. They are then carried outside to vans and trucks for delivery, the teams tidy up the auditorium, and by 10 o’clock you’d never know that anybody had been there that morning.

A few days later (December 12 this year), at 6:30 a.m., the directors gather at a Jewel supermarket on the south side for “food packing.” On arrival they see aisle after aisle with carts lined up full of shopping bags loaded with foodstuffs. The food is purchased, but Jewel employees contributes the overnight labor, the actual “packing” of the bags.

Each bag contains plenty of food for a fine holiday dinner, starting with a large canned ham and or turkey continuing through cakes, cookies, and vegetables. The directors wheel the carts outside and load the heavy bags, two per family, into their vans and trucks. By 8 a.m. the supermarket can open for business and the dinners are on their way to their various destinations, including not only very poor families but also many lonely and needy seniors.

If the directors have raised enough money, $50-$75 gift certificates go to the families and the seniors.

At both toy-packing and food-packing Al Fellinger, the “man of mercy,” looks slightly surprised at what his 50-year-ago experience has led to, and perhaps a bit sad that there are still so many empty refrigerators in Chicago.