In hard times, Bea Gaddy is Baltimore's growth industry. Each year she feeds more people, shelters more, redistributes more furniture, fixes more homes, counsels more people and in indefinable ways helps more neighbors live in dignity than she did the year before. Bea Gaddy is our Marylander of the Year. She is honored as a representative of all who work to relieve the pain of poverty, but also for her absolutely unique accomplishments.
The little row house at 140 N. Collington Ave., which began as home, is the Patterson Park Emergency Food Center, nerve center of the Bea Gaddy conglomerate. On any day, a stream of people calls at the front door, bearing food, dollars, energy, time, devotion. From the alley in back a larger stream shows up under the plywood roof covering a table and bench. These are the homeless and hungry, and like the volunteers are black and white, young and old, male and female. They are fed.
In what was the house's parlor -- walls covered with testimonials, paper notes stuck everywhere to tell who is supposed to do what, the volunteers coming and going, supplicants mingling -- Miss Bea, as she is called, directs operations. Stuff is stored all over the house, even the basement where she sleeps. Upstairs is a woman in the advanced stages of AIDS, for whose children Miss Bea is trying to find a future.
Perhaps 300 will show up for food. Another 200 meals will be delivered. A few blocks away at 425 N. Chester St., in Bea Gaddy's Women and Children Shelter, are 13 women, 10 children and one man. (Miss Bea was not going to split that family.) Nearby is another house with two mentally retarded residents. She has a truck and a little pick-up.
A space at Mondawmin Mall and two storage places hold donated furniture that her people repair and give away. Volunteers have renovated four houses and are working on a fifth, with sweat equity, to teach building skills and provide homes. Other activities are drug counseling, tenant counseling, health care, a lead paint program. The computer that keeps track is in Bea Gaddy's head.
Miss Bea is the kind of person she helps. She has been homeless in New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, jobless and hopeless in Baltimore, rooting in garbage cans to feed five children. The help she desperately wanted then, she provides today. Others preach the Golden Rule; Bea Gaddy lives it. By the late 1970s, Miss Bea was on her feet but a mere neighborhood eccentric, begging from grocery stores to feed the hungry around Patterson Park. President Reagan made her career.
