Even before she puts her own turkey on the table today, Loretta Warfield will have served 50 Thanksgiving dinners.
For more than two decades, through donations and fundraisers at the W.R. Grace & Co. chemical plant where she works as a janitor, Warfield has collected fresh turkeys, white potatoes, bread, pies and countless canned goods for Curtis Bay-area families who might not otherwise be able to celebrate the holiday. She has fed well over 1,000 families this way.
"I've been doing this for so long, it's just a part of me," Warfield said. At 65, she has survived two bouts with lymphoma, neither of which kept her from a single holiday season. Her tradition has earned her the nickname "Bea Gaddy of Grace," after the more well-known Baltimore woman synonymous with feeding the poor on Thanksgiving.
On Tuesday, Warfield and a dozen volunteers from Grace delivered this year's bounty - with her usual side of hugs. She held the hands of teary mothers and grandmothers and promised to return at Christmastime with more food and presents for the children.
This year was harder than most, Warfield said. The economy has left some of her families evicted from their rental homes and others without a working phone number. As the deliveries were made, more neighbors than usual shyly asked how they, too, could get a meal.
The recipients are selected by a longtime secretary at Curtis Bay Elementary, Grace's partner school. The secretary culls the free-lunch lists and also recommends local seniors who might benefit from holiday help. Warfield tries to vary the families from year to year, but she keeps the same seniors, many of whom are raising grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
It takes two rooms at Grace's Curtis Bay plant to handle all of the food and toys. One room says "Loretta's Kids." It's filled with 75 bicycles, 97 fleece shirts, 109 coats, as well as hats, helmets, toys and still more food to be delivered Dec. 17, the second phase of Warfield's holiday project. The other room, on Tuesday, looked like a grocery store. Cardboard boxes, bulging with Thanksgiving fixings and neatly labeled with their destinations, covered folding tables. Underneath, fresh turkeys sat in foil pans.
By 3 p.m., with holiday music playing over a crackling radio station, Warfield was dispatching Grace employees to make deliveries. She instructed the drivers, including maintenance men from the plant and corporate leaders from Grace's headquarters in Columbia, to hug the families, just as she does.
