Mary Henson, a retired school teacher and social justice activist, was there that first day in 1983 when a tiny band of volunteers began feeding the homeless in a battered former Sacramento bar they would rename Loaves & Fishes.

Then Martha Smyth, a mother of seven children who knew how to do “big cooking,” heard there was a new soup kitchen in Sacramento and found her way to the site on North C Street to volunteer.

A few weeks later Harlan Fawcett, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, knowing good people can have damaged lives, felt called upon to join some friends at the former McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento who made a ministry feeding the homeless.

Twenty years ago these three people joined with other volunteers, led by Loaves & Fishes founders Chris and Dan Delany, who felt a common calling to feed people who were hungry.

“Our volunteers are a gift from God,” said Chris Delany, president of Loaves & Fishes board of directors. “We do God’s work and he sends us the people to do it. We call it the bank of faith around here.”

One of those people is Henson, a member of Presentation Parish in Sacramento. She said she will never forget the day she and some friends from her prayer group at Presentation met up with another volunteer group from St. Lawrence Parish in North Highlands for their first day of kitchen duty at Loaves & Fishes.

“The floor sloped one way and the ceiling another, the hot water heater gave out, and we were serving food on cracked crockery — none of it matched,” Henson said. “We served 93 people that day but you would have thought we served 6,000.”

Their clients, she said, were mostly men off the street — many addicted to alcohol and a lot of them released from state mental hospitals that had been closed down.

“The majority of them really needed some help,” she said. “These are very grateful people, who when you serve you feel you are getting so much more than you’re giving.”

Henson liked the fact that the volunteers she worked with from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. — preparing, serving and cleaning up the kitchen — came from just about every faith with a presence in Sacramento.

One of her favorite memories is of a day almost 20 years ago when her crew arrived at Loaves & Fishes to prepare lunch and all they had to work with was a bunch of potatoes. Then one of the volunteers suggested the only solution to the dilemma was for everyone to sit in a circle and pray for five minutes.

“Someone walked in with enough lettuce to feed millions, someone else called in and said they had food left over from a party the day before,” Henson said. “We saw right there the miracle of Loaves & Fishes.”

For Smyth, who has also logged 20 years of volunteering with the ministry on North C Street, her work began as an anecdote to “empty nest syndrome.” But shortly after joined a group from her parish, St. Paul in Sacramento, the volunteers at Loaves & Fishes became very dear friends.

“You bond with these people. They’re there for the same reason you are,” she said. “If anyone of them called me, I’d be there in a heartbeat.”

A chef whose personal recipes for chili and vegetable casserole have become popular favorites at the Loaves & Fishes dining room, Smyth recalled with amusement in the early years standing on a box to stir beans and stew because the stove was so high, and using culinary tools best described as “primitive.”

But while cooking up nourishing food for people who are hungry has always seemed to her “a natural thing to do,” what Smyth most likes is just talking to the guests.

“I’m an extrovert. What you see is what you get,” she said. “Sitting down with someone and speaking to them when maybe they haven’t spoken to another individual in three weeks has never been a problem for me.”

Smyth’s talent in the kitchen started what has become a tradition at Loaves & Fishes. For 20 years she has arrived at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day to prepare turkey dressing. Working with her own crew, she makes dressing for up to 2,000 people.

An added touch of elegance to the Thanksgiving feast is provided by a donation of five gallons of homemade olives from her son Patrick’s 100-year old olive tree.

Fawcett too, remembers how his personal journey to Loaves & Fishes began 20 years ago. He had been meeting with a Bible study group with fellow veterans at McClellan Air Force Base when a member of the group mentioned he had started volunteering at Loaves & Fishes. Soon Fawcett began arriving twice a month to work at the kitchen helping prepare meals for 300 people in 50-gallon pots and chatting with the homeless men gathered at Friendship Park.

“There were many who had been young GIs over in Vietnam, kids who went through hell,” he said. “You can’t blame them for messing up their lives.”

A member of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Sacramento, Fawcett said Loaves & Fishes is really a sanctuary for all the people who go there “for the one good meal they have a day.”

Fawcett has come to understand the fragile line that separates volunteers like himself from “the guys at the park.”

“I could just as easily be the one being served instead of serving,” said Fawcett, a high school graduate who found his way and his profession in military service. “There but for the grace of God, go I.”

Since it opened its doors in 1983, Loaves & Fishes has grown from feeding 100 to more than 850 men, women and children daily and has added numerous survival services, including health care, education and affordable housing to assist the homeless in the Sacramento area.

While celebrating its 20th anniversary, the organization marked the serving of its four millionth meal on Nov. 3.

Tim Brown, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, said it’s not possible to overestimate the crucial role played by volunteers, who now number 1,000 a month.

“The volunteers supported us financially in the early days and brought their friends in,” he said. “One of the reasons we’ve survived and grown is because people see what we’re doing, feel a connection and spread the word.”

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