RELIEVING HUNGER OF AREA'S HOMELESS

VOLUNTEERS SERVE HOLIDAY FARE

Gloria Palmer plowed a fork into a plateful of food and her eyes grew wide.

"Hey!" said the mother of six, "These are real potatoes!"

Palmer, who had been bused with some of her children from the homeless shelter at the Capitol City Inn to a free Thanksgiving lunch at Tila's restaurant in Friendship Heights, grabbed a nearby waitress.

"Just bring me another plate," she said in a rush. "Forget the dressing. Forget the string beans. But the potatoes. The candied yams. The turkey."

The waitress looked confused.

"You think I'm joking?" Palmer asked.

Palmer was not joking.

Tila's usually serves blackened redfish and fajitas. And the long bar is generally a scene for professional chat over margueritas.

But for about two hours yesterday, nearly 200 shelter residents sat down to turkey with all the trimmings. Dozens of children ambled up to the bar for chocolate chip cookies and soft drinks.

And several hours later, nearly 10 times as many homeless people gathered for the fourth annual Community for Creative Non-Violence dinner on the East Lawn of the U.S. Capitol.

The CCNV has sponsored a Thanksgiving Day meal for the homeless for the last dozen years.

The first eight times the dinners were served in Lafayette Square across from the White House.

Tila's owner, Clive DuVal, hadn't been sure what to expect. Before moving to Washington about a year ago, he had prepared meals for the homeless in Houston with great success, he said.

DuVal is a member of Share Our Strength, a charitable group of hoteliers, restaurateurs and other business leaders. The group focuses most of its efforts on non-holiday activities.

"There's so many groups doing stuff on the holidays," he said.

For this Thanksgiving, though, the group got the Ehrlich Poultry Co. in Hyattsville to donate six 20-pound turkeys. Atlantic Food Corp. in Manassas pitched in with vegetables and plastic plates. And Atlantic Food Services gave pumpkin and apple pies.

Greyhound lent five buses to drive the diners from the shelter in Northeast Washington to Tila's, and most of DuVal's staff volunteered to dish up the meal.

Some of the homeless families winced at the press coverage. One family refused to enter the restaurant until they were guaranteed a seat away from the television cameras.

"It's good to help," said a man who identified himself only as Carl, an unemployed rug salesman. "But you have to consider other people's privacy. I was brought up to believe if you do something from the heart, you don't need all the publicity."

Vanessa Johnson, 34, an unemployed electrician's helper who came to Tila's with two of her four children, was just as happy to be eating out for a change.

Next April will mark Johnson's second year at the shelter, she said. She's been living there ever since she was evicted from a building where she paid $250 a month for an apartment with no electricity.

"I didn't know the guy I was paying the rent to didn't own the place," she said. "I didn't know the windows were broken until my son caught pneumonia."

Johnson poked at a slice of pumpkin pie and vanilla ice cream.

"It's great," she said. "It gives us a chance to get away from there for a while."

Meanwhile, on the East Lawn of the Capitol, as early as noon homeless people gathered on the chilly, damp grass to wait for CCNV's mammoth Thanksgiving dinner. Long before the food arrived, they were in lines that snaked back and forth across the sidewalks.

"We are hungry and so we came to eat," said John Emeka, a native of Nigeria, who said he now lives at the Gospel Mission shelter on Eighth Street NW.

"They tell me that the food is good, but I do not care whether it is good. I only am hungry and want to eat."

Many of those waiting for dinner were residents of the CCNV shelter and had helped to prepare the meal.

"I came because our dinner is here," said Doug Hill, a CCNV resident. "Our kitchen has been occupied with {preparing} this meal for days."

CCNV founder Mitch Snyder said the group planned to feed at least 2,000 people. For that, the organization prepared 250 roasted turkeys, 1,000 pumpkin pies, 100 gallons of stuffing, 60 gallons of gravy and many, many pounds of vegetables, most of which was donated.

"This is a good way for us to give thanks," said Barbara Oppenheimer, a psychotherapist who came with her four children and husband to help with the dinner. "Still, I think it's sad in this country when we have to turn Thanksgiving into a political issue and feed people in the cold in front of the nation's Capitol building to bring people's attention to the problem."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.