Daily Bread

Just as the Sunday morning Baltimore Farmers' Market underneath the Jones Falls Expressway was winding down, Arthur G. Morgan was gearing up for action. At noon Morgan hustled around the market picking up blue plastic bins filled with donated produce. Exchanging pleasantries with the merchants, he collected mounds of carrots, baskets of cucumbers, mountains of greens, a bin of apples, some herbs and several boxes of ripe Eastern Shore tomatoes. He piled the goods into the back of his aged Silverado and drove a few blocks up the Fallsway to Our Daily Bread.

Thomas Joseph Lopresti, a longtime Towson barber and volunteer at Our Daily Bread, died April 12 of leukemia at Mercy Medical Center. The Timonium resident was 72. He was raised in East Baltimore, the son of Italian immigrants Carmello and Innocenta Lopresti. He attended Baltimore City College, and took a few courses in barbering but basically learned the trade from his father, who owned a shop in Greektown. Except for a stint in the Coast Guard, he worked as a barber nearly all of his life.

When Catholic Charities of Baltimore opened a soup kitchen called Our Daily Bread on West Franklin Street in 1981, the plan envisioned feeding about 125 of the city's neediest people each day. Today that number has grown to an average of 650 people a day -- a jump that reflects the worsening plight of the urban poor and the yawning chasm between affluence and misery opened during the go-go decade of the 1980s.As one of the most effective, private charitable agencies in the city, Our Daily Bread has served literally hundreds of thousands of meals over the past 10 years.

Agnes E. May, a homemaker and volunteer, died Saturday of congestive heart failure at St. Joseph Medical Center. She was 88. A daughter of a Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. grocery store manager and a homemaker, Agnes Edith Ripple was born in Baltimore and raised on 36th Street in Govans. She was a 1940 graduate of Seton High School. In her youth, she enjoyed ice skating and was a semiprofessional bowler at the old North Avenue Sports Center, where she won a Triangle Sports Trophy in 1944.

The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimor has made a $35,000 donation to Our Daily Bread, a soup kitchen for the homeless operated by Associated Catholic Charities.The grant includes contributions from the Children of Harvey and Lyn Meyerhoff Philanthropic Fund and the Myerberg Philanthropic Fund."The Baltimore Jewish community is extremely concerned about the plight of the homeless and hungry," said Associated board chairman Suzanne F. Cohen.

They came in tuxes, velvet, sequins and satin to help raise money for Our Daily Bread, the soup kitchen on Cathedral Street that provides daily hot meals and other services to Baltimore's needy. The kitchen's seventh annual black-tie benefit dinner, chaired by Frank Gabor, attracted a sold-out crowd of 150. Those attending the event enjoyed music, a meal prepared by Baltimore chefs Nancy Longo and Michael Gettier, and a silent auction. Faces in the crowd included Walter Pinkerd, Stephen Fruin and party committee members Mary Ellen Kaplan, Barbara Brandjes and Nancy Footner "Some of the [clients]

THE FIRST GUY in line wore a woolen cap in the stifling humidity and said he hadn't worked in maybe two years. He wasn't entirely certain about dates. The guy behind him shivered and twitched in the heat and the muggy rain, as if tiny time bombs were bursting inside of him. They'd been standing here since 7. Now it was 9 o'clock, still an hour and a half from mealtime.A few feet away was a guy in a Northrop Grumman cap, out of work for three years, next to an unemployed construction worker and a homeless ex-truck driver and an ex-bricklayer standing in front of a woman in a silky skirt sitting on a piece of cardboard on the ground that offered her slim protection from the rain water rolling down this alley between Charles and Cathedral streets where hundreds lined up for food, as they do every day, outside Our Daily Bread.

I DON'T understand the bellyaching about the way things turned out with Our Daily Bread. Sure, the downtown business crowd overstated things by attributing an array of problems -- aggressive panhandling, shoplifting, car break-ins, empty retail space on Charles Street -- to the hundreds of men who congregate at ODB each day. And sure, the symbolism was vulgar -- wealthy white men (Peter Angelos, Jimmy Rouse, retired T. Rowe Price CEO George Collins)...

It seemed only fitting that Mary Classon and George Thompson helped lay bricks yesterday for the foundation of Our Daily Bread's new location at Franklin and Cathedral streets.After all, they are key elements of the foundation on which Our Daily Bread has expanded from a small group of parishioners handing out a few bologna sandwiches to a bustling center staffed with 3,000 volunteers who provide 700 meals each day to the poor and homeless.TTC "We started with just four or five hungry men who would come to [the Basilica of the Assumption]

High school seniors got a lesson this weekend in what it's like to sleep outdoors under cardboard when it rains. It didn't rain exactly. While taking part in a "sleepover" outside a local soup kitchen, some of the students were soaked when a garden irrigation system unexpectedly turned on at 3 in the morning. Nevertheless, a point was made. "The night changed my thoughts about the homeless," said 18-year-old Sunny Odogwu, a senior at St. Frances Academy who lives on Brentwood Avenue.

Jane P. Baker, a homemaker and Our Daily Bread volunteer, died of a heart attack Aug. 24 at the Edenwald retirement community. She was 90 and had lived in Guilford and the Orchards for many years. Born Jane Burton Parr in Portsmouth, Va., she moved to Baltimore as a child and lived in Mount Washington. She was a Cathedral School graduate and met her future husband, attorney George W. Baker, at the Catholic Action Guild, a volunteer club that met at the school. Mrs. Baker was a 1939 Western High School graduate.

Charles S. "DC" Reed, former food service director at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Greater Baltimore Medical Center, died July 24 of lung cancer at his Towson home. He was 79. Born and raised in Towson, Mr. Reed attended Loyola High School and graduated in 1949 from Towson Catholic High School. Mr. Reed enlisted in the Navy and served as a gunner's mate aboard the subchaser USS Crestview and later on the carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt and the destroyer USS Hemminger. After being discharged from active duty, he remained a naval reservist until 1958.

Just as the Sunday morning Baltimore Farmers' Market underneath the Jones Falls Expressway was winding down, Arthur G. Morgan was gearing up for action. At noon Morgan hustled around the market picking up blue plastic bins filled with donated produce. Exchanging pleasantries with the merchants, he collected mounds of carrots, baskets of cucumbers, mountains of greens, a bin of apples, some herbs and several boxes of ripe Eastern Shore tomatoes. He piled the goods into the back of his aged Silverado and drove a few blocks up the Fallsway to Our Daily Bread.

After two back-to-back storms that left Baltimore struggling under a double layer of snow, several city residents said they were grateful to have access to some basic resources - even if they could not call them their own. Alvesta Williamson, 41, has been staying at Baltimore's 24-hour shelter for about five months, after a short detour in Oklahoma. "It could be a lot worse," he said. "People could be on the street." The city's 24-hour, year-round homeless shelter, which has about 350 beds at 210 Guilford Ave. and an 80-bed overflow location, welcomed anyone who came in through the storm, said Diane Glauber, president of Baltimore Homeless Services.

BWI back to normal on Friday Updated 6:52 p.m.: Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport expects to resume normal operations Friday, according to a spokesperson. The first commercial flight after the two-day winter storm arrived at BWI Thursday morning at 9:02 a.m. Throughout the day, airlines ramped up their schedules and by evening, Southwest, the airport's leading carrier, was operating its usual number of flights. Passengers who have been affected by flight cancellations and want to rebook their travel are encouraged to contact the airlines by phone or use their Web sites rather than going to the airport to make reservations.