LONGMONT, Colo.—On that grim day in 1984, after removing dozens of livestock carcasses from the dairy, Gloria Whitcomb’s family did the math and decided to move from Peas, Minn., to Tempe, Ariz.
Faulty barn rewiring had electrocuted half of the 100 cows they milked and driven these farmers out of the business in search of a fresh start.
Whitcomb, 66, initially regretted swapping the fertile land near the plot her Dutch immigrant grandfather settled a century earlier for a low-end rental property in the desert.
In Arizona, her husband installed sheet rock. She worked as a telemarketer and draped tablecloths over cardboard boxes doubling as end tables to make the new place homier for her three school-aged children.
“I know what it’s like to have nothing,” the Longmont resident said, though now long employed in foster care for developmentally disabled adults and happily married to the same man who works at a Greeley-area dairy.
But she calls the dead cattle curse a blessing in disguise for opening her eyes to the poor and giving her a bigger heart to do something for them.
“I know that people know that the economy is bad. But I don’t know that everyone sees these people,” she said.
Whitcomb sees them every week when she drives Sherry Muniz, an unemployed nurse with health problems, to The Good News Center’s food bank.
And they see her, a woman refined—not crushed—by hardship.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of situation you’re in. She makes you feel OK about it. She doesn’t make you feel like a piece of scum, just crawling around on the earth,” Muniz, 45, of Longmont, said.
Whitcomb for years has organized the OUR Center’s 800-plate Thanksgiving dinner. She also runs the clothing bank at The Journey, her church in Longmont.
But in 2006 she gravitated to the little-known food and clothing center hidden behind commercial buildings near the railroad tracks at Ninth Avenue and Atwood Street.
Its founder, 82-year-old Virginia Daniels, started the ministry as a teenager by collecting food from neighbors and distributing it to those in need from her parents’ basement in Decatur, Ill.
“And when I needed a loaf of bread, I bought two loaves so I would have one for me and one for the (food) bank,” she said during a telephone interview from her home in Xenia, Ill., where she moved in December from Longmont to live with her daughter.
Daniels was born with webbed feet and used a cart her father built to stay mobile until surgeries at age 16 allowed her to walk. She said that gratitude motivated her to pray that God would use her life to help others.
The retired nurse opened a center in Longmont in the late 1980s. The folks she hoped to help now form a waiting line up to 300 families deep—roughly double last year’s head count—on Wednesdays starting two hours before doors open at 9 a.m.
There, older women with neatly applied lipstick stand beside unshaven middle-aged men.
Children dangle from the hands and hips of their mothers and look forward to the treat they have come to expect from center volunteer Stan Harvey, 57.
“I feel sorry for the little kids. They have to go with what they get in life,” the Longmont resident said.
During Holy Week, Harvey picked up three shipping boxes of Peeps marshmallows from Walgreen’s after the clerk heard his story and let him repeatedly use his single coupon.
Whitcomb, as the center’s newest board member, goes after deals on a grander scale.
She works her cell phone to get bread from King Soopers and turkeys from Longmont Foods.
A pending contract she presented to a local dairy could bolster the milk the center distributes from its main supplier, the Gunbarrel-based Community Food Share, she said.
At 8:50 a.m., those in the queue bow their heads and hold hands as volunteer Linda Knowles, 61, prays for them in English. Another woman prays in Spanish.
Then, center director Jenny Pinedo welcomes the crowd in both languages, opens the double doors and watches as volunteers check photo identification and proof of address at a table stocked with Workforce Boulder County and Child Health Plan Plus brochures.
Clients pluck cardboard boxes stacked by the boiler and fill them with one baked good, meat product, dairy item, canned fruit and vegetable and some produce.
“Gloria’s new here,” said Pinedo, who volunteered at the center before recently becoming its director. “But I respect her because I know she knows what we need, and because I know she cares. If I called Gloria in the middle of the night, if I was sick, she would be there. … She’s a beautiful person. She has the Lord in her heart.”
Whitcomb said her experiences of both receiving and giving embolden her cold-calling for donations.
As a child, she remembers area farmers praying for her family and allowing them to glean their fields after hail destroyed her dad’s 80-acre corn crop.
A 2002 church missions trip to Zambia inspired her to fight harder against hunger at home.
“We saw those kids with the pot belly and the blond hair (due to malnutrition),” she said. “There is nothing worse than a child who has to even think about whether they’re going to have food or not.”
She hopes her story encourages those blessed with enough to remember the poor.
“It is so much easier for people to be on the giving end than to be on the receiving end,” Whitcomb said. “The people who need to be at the center know where it is. But the people who need to donate to it do not.”
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OUR Center:
Community Food Share:
