"Fifty-three. Fifty-four. Fifty-five ..."
Brendan Walsh's head count at the doorway into the Viva House soup kitchen numbers the poor in this Southwest Baltimore neighborhood.
Fifty-three is a guy on crutches Walsh recognizes.
"Hey, you're getting around pretty good, huh? Beats that wheelchair, doesn't it?"
The poor may be with us always, as the Scriptures say, or maybe not, but the line at Viva House certainly seems endless. They come on foot, on crutches, in wheelchairs, old and young, alone and in couples and, more often over these last years, in family groups large and small.
Walsh and his wife, Willa Bickham, opened the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality and Resistance at 26 S. Mount St. in October 1968. On Thursday, Viva House celebrates its 30th anniversary with an open house and fried chicken dinner. Bickham and Walsh figure they've served three-quarters of a million meals in the neighborhood known as Sowebo and handed out more than 300 tons of food. Some 3,000 homeless people, mostly women and children, have found temporary shelter at Viva House.
All this without government money, without foundation grants, without help from Catholic Charities or even the Maryland Food Committee. Instead they carry on with unpaid volunteers, small private donations and the aid of schools and parishes.
The couple lives in the two rowhouses that now make up Viva House and raised their daughter there. Bickham is 56; Walsh, 55. Both have grown a bit gray but retain a buoyant, youthful energy. Bickham is 5-foot-3, tough, vibrant and warm. Walsh, only a tad taller, has a solid, planted, four-square look as he collects chits at the doorway.
Walsh gives out numbers at the gate to the lovely garden in the back yard to keep a little order. Then he calls out numbers when tables become available, a soup kitchen maitre d'.
"Seventy-four. Seventy-five. We're in the second hundred now."
Two kids leave carrying foam cups of juice.
"Don't throw the cups on the street, if you can help it," Walsh cautions.
"They're carrying them home," says their grandmom.
"So you need them? OK," Walsh says.
In this neighborhood, recycling means reusing plastic cups. The neighbors of Viva House are among the poorest people in the city. The last census showed 41 percent live below the $12,674 poverty line for a family of four. And lots of families of four eat regularly at the soup kitchen. Fifty-five percent of the children here live below the poverty line.
A family place
"I think we have developed into a very family-oriented place," Bickham says. "They know it's safe to come here to eat. They come by to use the phone. They come by for help with papers to fill out. They know we're here at night. They know we're here in the morning."
The couple's daughter, Kate Walsh-Little, is here again, too.
Growing up at Viva House, she says, "I got to meet so many different kinds of people, and it just made me so open to other cultures. It was different. There were tons of people living here -- and there were all these meetings after meetings. I thought everybody lived like that."
Today, she is 29 and living here with her husband David Walsh-Little, a lawyer working with the poor at his Sowebo Center for Justice. She teaches at Frederick Elementary School, about six blocks west, and runs a reading and writing program at Viva House. The Walsh-Littles tithe part of their earnings for the house, and volunteer at the soup kitchen.
Bickham and Walsh have always worked outside jobs to pay their private expenses. After she got her degree from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, she went to work for Mercy Southern Health Center. After 21 years, she's still there on a half-time schedule.
"The work was so complementary to Viva House that I just stayed," she explains. It's lovely to be paid well to do one of the works of mercy in a neighborhood adjoining Viva House. The people that I took care of, some of them are from this neighborhood."
Margaret Raider waits with four of her children -- she has nine -- under the shelter in the pretty backyard with its handsome crape myrtle and early fall flowers and a fine old fir in the corner. "I got married young," says Raider, 49. "My oldest is 31, my baby's 4."
They're regulars at Viva House. The meal they'll eat this day is two "coddies," macaroni salad, potato chips and juice, and milk for the kids. Oranges and bread are on the table.
"There's nothing we serve we wouldn't sit down and eat ourselves," Walsh says.
A few days later, the menu is three hot dogs, pork and beans flavored with ham and brown sugar, and sauerkraut. Bickham fills plates in the kitchen.
"I think there's a great deal of peace and respect at the soup kitchen because they know we live here," she says. "No one tries to trash it because it's their place, too."
The guests eat in three rooms warmly decorated with Bickham's watercolors and sometimes fiercely rousing silk-screen posters, etchings by the Catonsville Nine and Plowshares activist Tom Lewis, woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg from the Catholic Worker newspaper, photos from El Salvador by Jim Harney and collages, hanging stars and mobiles made by kids in Walsh-Little's classes and at Park School.
Walsh figures some 700 volunteers have worked at Viva House over the years -- people like Lloyd Jennings, 35, who used to live in the neighborhood, taking meals at the soup kitchen.
"I come back to give a little something back that I took away," says Jennings, dishing up the food.
"Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. And one hundred."
Walsh has counted off 200 now. Some kids from Calverton Junior High wait in the garden.
"They've just come from school," Walsh says. "We didn't let kids come in by themselves until we got to know them."
A pair of 10-year-olds from Walsh-Little's school, Joshua Brillo and Joseph Cook, help out in the kitchen. Betsy Krieger, 11, has come down from Ridgely Middle School in Lutherville with her mother Jean to help serve.
A rocky start
"When we found this place I was pregnant with Kate, and it was in miserable condition," Bickham says. "I mean this was trashed and filled with rodents."
They rented it for $75 a week from Lou and Sarah Eisenberg, who ran a grocery around the corner. In 1975, the Eisenbergs sold it to a Viva House trust for $1,000.
"We used to have ceilings fall in," Bickham recalls. "We didn't have any money [so] we had all these posters of our heroes and causes all over the ceiling, and people thought it was so interesting. But actually we were covering up all the holes."
Little by little, she says, repairs were made. "Dorothy Day sent down a couple of people from New York to help us."
Day, a convert to Roman Catholicism and an IWW-style pacifist-socialist-anarchist, along with Peter Maurin, a French-born radical agrarian philosopher, founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression. They fed the jobless, homeless and hungry at their first hospitality house on New York City's Lower East Side.
"Dorothy took the best of what I believe in the church, the social teachings," says Bickham, who calls herself "post-Christian." "The encyclicals written by the pope are excellent. I mean, the rights of the worker, the preferential action for the poor are all there."
The movement flourished during the 1930s, waned during World War II, when Day's pacifism alienated even many of her fellow Catholic Workers, then rebounded with the postwar nuclear threat and the Vietnam War. There are now about 125 Catholic Worker communities across America. Viva House is one of the oldest.
The first guests on the day Viva House opened included members of the Catonsville Nine, the anti-war activists who sparked a generation of protest when they burned draft board records in protest of Vietnam. Walsh was the outside man; he drove the nine to their rendezvous with history.
Bickham and Walsh remain unconditionally committed to peace and justice. Two pillars of the Catholic Worker tradition, she says, are pacifism and anarchism.
"I'd certainly describe myself as a socialist, which I equate with anarchist," she says. "The basic principle of pacifism is that you believe in the goodness of people. We certainly do that. And you go and ask for something and people are so generous, oh, my goodness!"
They've protested and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam and nuclear weapons and for more affordable housing and help for the homeless. On Monday nights this month, they've joined the anti-death penalty vigil at the Maryland penitentiary.
The count up at least 20 arrests between them: "But I've never been in jail more than three days," Bickham says self-deprecatingly.
"Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Ninety ..."
A celebrity
As Walsh's count approaches 300, a minor neighborhood celebrity finds a seat.
"She's mentioned in the book "The Corner," Walsh says. "The Corner" is the documentary book about drugs in Baltimore by David Simon and Ed Burns. The corner they wrote about, Fayette and Monroe streets, is just four blocks from Viva House.
The neighborhood has gotten poorer during the past 30 years, Walsh and Bickham say. Crack cocaine arrived with a firestorm of devastation after 1980, making it "a dangerous place to live," she says. But the drug activity is changing, with more people using heroin. "So it's a little bit quieter these days," she says, noting a strange truth of drug life. "Heroin mellows you out, whereas the crack hypes you up. So it's a little easier to live here."
She talks about the "mystery people who walk through your life." Like the young man who approached them as they worked outside one day and started shaking their hands.
"He was very quiet, and said, 'You saved my life,' We were kind of stunned. We said, 'We just have the soup kitchen here.' 'I know. I know who I'm talking to. You saved my life.' "
On this ordinary day in Baltimore, the sun is shining. The stock market is up. The buildings of downtown shimmer like Emerald City in the haze of a fine fall afternoon. And Brendan Walsh suggests there's definitely less sympathy for the poor.
"There was a period when the homeless was everybody's issue." He laughs. "But that didn't last long, because they couldn't end it. So now it's hostility. We just want to get rid of them. That's the whole thing.
"It's an interesting country," he says.
And his count of the poor and hungry reaches 329 on this ordinary day in Southwest Baltimore.
Pub Date: 10/28/98